Can Urban Resilience be Redeemed? Theories, Models and Tactics for Contemporary Cities organised by the PhD Programme in Urban and Regional Development

What is resilience? From a physical and natural sciences perspective, it implies the ‘capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks’.
But for planners and geographers dealing with space - who are more interested in transformative potentials rather than vulnerabilities management- resilience must bring about something more than ‘reworking’ and ‘resistance’. Resilience captures ‘the ability of an urban system - and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales - to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity’.
Using this interrogation as a point of departure, the Ph.D. Excellence Course “Can Urban Resilience be Redeemed? Theories, Models and Tactics for Contemporary Cities” aims at revisiting the concept of resilience along the lines of critical consideration questioning if it is a useful paradigm which allows us to think in new ways about planning theory.