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Overview:

Urban Resilience:

Urban resilience is the ability to enable and support the defenses, adaptations and transitions required to urban systems facing natural and human driven threats or stresses. The capacities and qualities conferring resilience to the urbanization phenomenon should be developed through proper urban design, policy, planning and management practices, and re-thinking the way in which the urban spaces are built and used by a changing society. But which are those qualities and how to implement them?

Natural spaces and urban context:

Cities have always grown near specific resourceful places, providing the proper environmental qualities for urban structure and functions. Nowadays such resources come from worldwide networks feeding our cities. However, after the twentieth century industrial and productivist thinking neglecting these environmental conditions and values, critical concerns highlight the role played by green and blue spaces within our urban systems.

What are the development patterns of  these ecosystems in the city?

How urbanization should develop accounting for the environmental integrity also beyond its physical boundaries?

Scales and dimensions:

When thinking about the urbanization process we should take in mind that metropolis and other megacities represent only a very small part of the urban population and even a smaller part of the whole human population. Urbanization needs deeper and critical understandings, mainly related to its dimensions and scales, in order to not confuse growing cities with urbanization phenomenon. Major cities with more than 500,000 inhabitants in Europe represent barely 25% of the total population. In Languedoc Roussillon cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants do not even represent 65% of the total population. Urban sprawl or dense networks of small towns maybe have less influence on global scale than metropolis, but do critically contribute to environmental fragmentation and pollution.

How to account for such urbanization diversity in relation to its environmental impacts?

And how to deal with scales in framing urban resilience?

Are denser sustainable cities more resilient than others?

Places and social heterogeneity:

In the city, gentrification processes and increasing inequalities are fostering the development of ghettos.. Urban services supplies and quality of life change dramatically shifting from urban centers and urban fringes. Privileged citizens have the access to  green spaces while the disadvantaged must adapt unsafe and low services neighborhoods.  How urban resilience relates to such places and social heterogeneity?Are wealthy areas more resilient than the spontaneous occupations of unbuildable lands?  How social resilience relates with urban sustainability?

Organizer:  Luc Doumenc

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