How Does the Concept of Resilient City Work in Practice? Planning and Achievements

Abstract

In the past decade, resilient cities (RCs) have gained extensive attention in academic and political debates as a vision of urban futures. In particular, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient City 100 Program (RC100), a number of cities worldwide have pushed this concept forward from theory to practice through their RC plans/strategies. However, there is widespread doubt regarding how much this holistic idea of the future built environment contributes to urban practice. After developing a scoring evaluation matrix based on the synthesis of existing RC assessment frameworks, this review scrutinizes the plans, reports, city leaders’ speeches, official websites and academic reviews of five representative resilient cities and investigates their motivations, planning and achievements. The results demonstrate a huge theoretical and practical gap in RC: while RC plans attempt to expand as comprehensively as possible from cities’ initially narrow motivations, their achievements in implementation are limited. Although RC provides more holistic solutions to the cities, the limited resources mean that cities have to prioritize their urgent issues in their everyday practice. This paper calls for designating more feasible and specific features in RC visions and maintaining regular alignments from planning to actions in future RC practice.