Sustainable Development and Resilience: A Combined Analysis of the Cities of Rotterdam and Thessaloniki

Abstract

The concept of a resilient city and its relationship with sustainable development has already received wide attention among academics, practitioners, and decision-makers, especially in the last decade. For many scholars, resilience is one of the concepts of sustainable development, in the sense that even more sustainability is an essential goal for development, and resilience is a way of thinking and acting that would lead us towards achieving sustainability. Moreover, resilience is about building and planning to future-proof cities. Resilience is a process that represents a new way of thinking, determining which urban challenges and crises have the lowest impact, and also building back better and evolving. The main aim of this study is to identify the potential relationship between sustainable development and resilience by using the Espiner et al. model. The model, which was created in reference to nature-based tourism destinations, suggests that the relationship between sustainability and resilience in tourism can be illustrated by three potential states: emergent, developing, and mature. In the present study, we adapt these potential states in case studies of the cities of Rotterdam (The Netherlands) and Thessaloniki (Greece), in order to demonstrate whether they are emergent, developing, or mature, by examining the critical documents of the (a) City Resilience Framework, and (b) Resilient Strategy Reports for Thessaloniki and Rotterdam, respectively.