Planning Resilient Community: Public Participation and Governance

Dear Colleague,

Cities across the globe are increasingly facing complex and multifaceted risks due to mounting population pressure and climatic hazards. It is projected that almost 85% of the population in developed countries and more than 65% in low and middle-income countries will reside in urban areas by 2050 and contribute to even more challenges (Béné et al., 2018). The average annual estimated losses of global cities from climate change and other social and economic risks is around USD 415 billion (WB, 2016). To cater to a sustainable built environment, “the concept of resilience is increasingly being used as an organising principle to frame scientific and political discourses on cities” (Yamagata & Sharifi, 2018, p. 3). The concept has recently been promoted further by the United Nations through the new Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 9 & 11) to support resilient communities and infrastructure (UN, 2015).       

Resilience is a polysemic concept and has a long history in environmental systems and has also been widely used in various fields of knowledge, including climate change adaptation, migration, and psychology. According to Yamagata and Sharifi (2018, p.7), resilience is critical to ‘’enhance resistance, robustness, and absorption capacities of the system, …. and [to] develop plans to recover rapidly in case damage has occurred’’. The concept entered into urban planning as a prominent policy narrative mainly from ecology. It strengthens the ability of socio-ecological systems to tackle urban environmental risks and to cope with changing climatic, socio-economic, political, and institutional landscapes (Harris, Chu, and Ziervogel, 2018). This concept is an improvement on the traditional ‘prevent and predict’ approach and suggests an in-depth understanding and an accommodation of complexities and uncertainties evolving from the changing socio-ecological systems (Orleans Reed et al., 2013). The new strategy calls for more innovative and adaptive planning approaches that involve exploring indigenous knowledge, scenario building, and integrative mechanisms.       

This Special Issue ‘Planning Resilient Community: Public Participation and Governance’ will uncover the theory and practice of planning for urban resilience. In this regard, we focus on innovation and investigation regarding community engagement and institutional approaches to deal with socio-ecological systems. The community and individuals are the centre of discussion in resilience-oriented planning, and several studies have recommended innovation and integration through social learning process (Schauppenlehner-Kloyber and Penker, 2016). We are interested to know how the community can engage in reducing vulnerability using local knowledge and self-organisation capacities. The role of institutional reforms for planning resilient communities is also critical in unpacking an adaptive management approach. In line with this discourse, we invite theoretical and empirical papers on but not limited to the following thematic areas:       

• Adaptive governance and negotiated resilience to urban disaster;
• Co-design/co-creation in building resilient communities;
• Behaviour and motivation towards residential and industrial energy-efficient practice;
• Individual and community approaches in urban greening;
• Ecosystem service and the non-monetary valuation of natural resources;
• Participatory conservation and the regeneration of the built environment;
• Communal approach to food security;
• Urban metabolism (linear vs. circular);
• Promoting equity and social justice through local engagement;
• Reconsidering urban informality in adaptive planning;
• Promoting industry, innovation, and infrastructure;
• Climate-resilient planning and land use policy;
• Sustainable cities and communities.

References

Béné, C., Mehta, L., McGranahan, G., Cannon, T., Gupte, J., & Tanner, T. (2018). Resilience as a policy narrative: potentials and limits in the context of urban planning. Climate and Development, 10(2), 116-133.

Gillard, R. (2016). Questioning the diffusion of resilience discourses in pursuit of transformational change. Global environmental politics, 16(1), 13-20.

Harris, L. M., Chu, E. K., & Ziervogel, G. (2018). Negotiated resilience. Resilience, 6(3), 196-214.

Orleans Reed, S., Friend, R., Toan, V. C., Thinphanga, P., Sutarto, R., & Singh, D. (2013). “Shared learning” for building urban climate resilience–experiences from Asian cities. Environment and Urbanization, 25(2), 393-412.

Schauppenlehner-Kloyber, E., & Penker, M. (2016). Between participation and collective action—from occasional liaisons towards long-term co-management for urban resilience. Sustainability, 8(7), 664.

UN. (2015). Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York: United Nations Retrieved from https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld/publication.

WB. (2016). How Can We Finance the Resilient Cities of the Future? New York: The World Bank Retrieved from https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2016/10/11/how-can-we-finance-the-resilient-cities-of-the-future.

Yamagata, Y., & Sharifi, A. (2018). Resilience-Oriented Urban Planning: Theoretical and Empirical Insights (Vol. 65). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

Dr. Mohammad Swapan
Dr. Courtney Babb
Dr. Reazul Ahsan
Guest Editors

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• participatory planning
• climate resilience
• sustainable behaviour and practice
• community innovation
• community energy management
• urban agriculture
• non-monetary valuation
• adaptive governance
• sustainable cities