Resilience Reporting for Sustainable Development in Cities

Abstract

Recently, a new paradigm has emerged—the resilient city. It is an evolutionary concept rooted in recent—but more consolidated—city visions, such as a smart city or a sustainable city, from which it inherits the interweaving of different dimensions. This paper investigates the factors behind effective resilience reporting, as well as how a city should draw up an urban resilience strategy report to be accountable to its citizens. We first highlighted the main factors to design and implement reporting for the achievement of strategic resilience goals, by combining research on a resilient city and accountability practices. These factors could be organized following two different perspectives: political and sociotechnical. Then, we applied our framework to four pioneering municipalities selected as paradigmatic case studies. A qualitative content analysis applied to the city resilience reports has provided depth to our framework. We found that the “weak factor” is the ability to embed the resilience strategy in rooted connections and transform itself into an ecosystem that crosscuts different sectoral urban processes. Our exploratory research claims could be used for future research in this field, as cities are becoming increasingly complex systems, where the quality of life and well-being of a larger population depends.