Proceedings of the CIB World Building Congress 2016 Volume I Creating built environments of new opportunities

Countries across the globe are likely to face significant challenges in coming years that will test the resilience of their cities. However, there is often a lack of proactive evidence-based analysis of available options and their outcomes as well as indicators of success or progress. Without such analysis it is difficult to clearly gauge progress towards set goals, to improve effective policy development and implementation, and to create an active learning culture that can efficiently and effectively tackle future challenges. The present work offers an introduction to research being done to develop a policy evaluation and implementation framework that can help policy-makers produce more effective resilience policies which are sustainable over time. The term sustainable resilience has some usage in the literature but has had limited uptake and has not been formally characterised until now. This new concept creates a clear differentiation from reactive disaster resilience which is often the sole focus of urban policy development. This paper contributes to developing a working concept and guiding principles for urban sustainable resilience policy. This work suggests that sustainable resilience policy will need to take into account the complexity within and between the various systems that form cities, rapidly changing technologies, environmental conditions, and emerging forms of governance. This paper also briefly outlines the methodology that will be used to continue to develop a sustainable resilience policy framework and evidence-based assessment tool