Urban Resilience: a framework for empowering cities in face of heterogeneous risk factors

As remarked in the presentation of the special issue of the A|Z Journal - Cities at risk - the increasing losses due to natural hazards, often combined with technological ones, let arise the need for new approaches addressed to evaluate vulnerability and resilience of cities in face of hazard factors, in order to better drive disaster mitigation policies. Tacking up this challenge, this contribution focuses on the “multifaceted” concept of resilience that, bridging different research fields (ecology, sustainability, risk, climate change), can play a key-role for enhancing cities’ capacity to deal with the heterogeneous factors currently threatening them: climate change, individual and coupled hazards, from scarcity of resources to environmental degradation. In detail, based on the in-depth analysis of the capacities of a resilient system and of the different models of resilience up to now carried out, an interpretative model of Urban Resilience has been outlined. Such a model represents a methodological tool for driving planners and decision-makers in building up resilient cities, enabling them to frame, into a comprehensive approach, the currently fragmented policies addressed to tackle different issues: from the climate change to the complex chains of hazards; from the environmental decay to the scarcity of natural resources