Framing resilience: social uncertainty in designing urban climate resilience

Building urban resilience to climate change and other challenges will be essential for maintaining thriving cities into the future. Resilience has become very popular in both research on and practice of climate adaptation. However, people have different interpretations of what it means: what resilience-building contributes to, what the problems, causes and solutions are, and what trade-offs, side-effects and other normative choices are acceptable. These different ways of ‘framing’ climate resilience are hidden in the positive, but sometimes fairly vague, language used to promote it. Based on the current urban resilience literature, I will describe divergent ways of framing resilient urban climate adaptation and will explore their implications. Two important frames of urban resilience include the ‘system resilience’ frame, which focuses on maintaining urban functions and processes, and the ‘community resilience’ frame, which emphasises urban life, and community capacity & self-sufficiency. Other important (contrasting) frames include ‘static resilience’, dealing with quick return to equilibrium, and ‘dynamic resilience’, dealing with adaptability and co-evolving with trends. The frames used by scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders reflect social uncertainties in climate adaptation, related to values, preferences, and goals. They entail different visions on the urban future, leading to different potential realisations of climate change adaptation. Leaving them implicit can result in a ‘dialogue of the deaf’, potentially leading to adaptation failure. Urban decision-makers and stakeholders will need to investigate and develop a clear vision on what they mean by urban resilience: what are the goals, and who’s or what’s resilience are we talking about? Explicit exploration of the current and potential frames will help to cultivate meaningful discussion on the choices and trade-offs to be made in developing climate-resilient urban futures.