Building Urban Resilience in New York City

Existing research shows that cities around the world are now turning to urban resilience as a new approach to governing the urban climate challenges because of the increasing exposure of vulnerable populations and critical infrastructures in coastal cities and communities to extreme weather events. However, there is limited scholarly understanding about how cities and urban regions overcome challenges to the implementation of urban resilience. In particular, little research has focused on local stakeholder perspectives on urban resilience, which can offer valuable insights to help cities and urban regions address these challenges. To better understand stakeholder perspectives, this dissertation shares the results of a Q-sort analysis of stakeholders’ perspectives of the East Side Coastal Resiliency (ESCR) Project, an urban resilience project in New York City’s Lower East Side (LES). Using the Q Methodology to identify the most significant ideas on how to address the implementation challenges of the ESCR Project, the findings of this Q study include the following stakeholder perspectives: 1) the City needs to provide resiliency projects that provide both interim and long term catastrophic costal flood protection and give communities a voice in a collaborative and equitable planning process: 2) the City needs to invest in resiliency infrastructure projects through a genuine democratic participatory process to enhance equity and resilience of vulnerable populations; and 3) the City i needs to actively engage the stakeholders and use their input in the implementation of a resiliency project and creation of a vibrant ecosystem to reduce future climate risks. These stakeholder perspectives offer practical recommendations that can help address the challenges to the implementation of the ESCR Project to advance New York City’s infrastructure resilience strategy as well as insights into promoting urban resilience more broadly