Housing and Resilience-When, for Whom and for What? A Critical Agenda

As a concept resilience is proving remarkably...resilient. It has become a keyword used to describe the contemporary urban and environmental condition. However, unlike that other prolific keyword "sustainability", it lacks both the ethical intent (if not practice) and international agreement of the Brundtland Report directive to seek to balance economic, social and environmental outcomes for the benefit of future generations. Resilience, like concepts such as flexibility, efficiency or social capital, can be highly politicized and often mean very different things to different people. Herein lies both the potential and pitfalls of such a term, especially when it has become such a powerful signifier for how best to respond to the conditions inherent in our climate of change. Within housing research scholarship and practice, the concept is both ubiquitous and under-theorized. This special issue seeks to draw critical attention to the use of the concept. Key questions for housing include: Resilience in housing how, when, for whom and for what?