Unveiling Urban Resilience: Exploring the Qualities and Interconnections of Urban Systems

Urban climate change resilience (UCCR) has emerged as a crucial topic, particularly in rapidly growing urban areas, encompassing disaster risk reduction, mitigation actions, and adaptation strategies. UCCR emphasizes the ability of cities to evolve, adapt, survive, and thrive in the face of climate change stresses, recognizing them as dynamic systems. Several observable qualities contribute to urban resilience, which have been extensively discussed in the literature and demonstrated through resilience frameworks and assessment methods. These qualities include reflectivity (learning and reorganization capacities), robustness, redundancy, flexibility, resourcefulness, inclusivity, diversity, integration, rapidity, and safe failure. This chapter delves into the essential qualities of a resilient built environment, focusing on key themes. It synthesizes these resilience qualities and explores their interrelations, drawing upon evidence from current research on urban systems’ resilience. Additionally, the chapter highlights projected climate change impacts, categorizing them into different groups based on their nature and the resulting disasters they may induce. By examining these themes and dimensions, this chapter contributes to the understanding and advancement of built environment resilience by offering insights into the complex challenges posed by climate change and the strategies to enhance urban resilience.