Advanced Brainstorm Carrefour (ABC): The Science of the City Naples, March 2016 Presentation by Oto Hudec

1. City of Resilience
Oto Hudec,
TUKE, Faculty of Economics, Košice, Slovakia
Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner
Sometimes I feel like my only friend
It's the city I live in, the City of Angels
Lonely as I am, together we cry
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under the Bridge

2. Content
• Resilience people and cities
• Global shocks  local resilience,
• Typology of risks/threats
• Economic resilience, resilience capacity
• Resilience, adaptive systems and related terms
• Cities of resilience, adaptive planning

3. Intro: People, cities and resilience
• People: Resilience is about lasting, about making it through
crises, inner strength and strong physical constitution,
• Cities -they too need to last, to respond to crises and adapt in a
way that may cause them to change and grow differently;
• Cities require an inner strength in people (agility, spirit, ...), as well
as a strong physical infrastructure and built environment. *
• Resilience of cities is related to its people resilience, although....
In Pompei, year 62, possibly resilient people were at a wrong
place.
• Cities of fear - decisions based on short-term, even panicked
responses; threats seen everywhere
• Cities of hope - long term planning, consensus around
cooperation and partnership, threats as opportunities
* Peter Newman, Timothy Beatley, and Heather Boyer. Resilient cities : responding to peak oil and climate change. 2009

4. Before the global time
• Mt Peleé, St. Pierre, Martinique, 1902.
• City officials wanted to keep voters in the
city for an election that was to be held
on May 11. Based on newspaper
articles, many people in the countryside
flocked to St. Pierre thinking that it was
the safest place to be. The population
ballooned to about 28,000, nearly all of
which would perish in the cataclysmic
eruption of May 8.
• Cause: Nature
• Local disaster
• Result: Today the city is in decay

5. Tsunami Phi Phi Island, Thailand 2004
• December 26, 2004 tsunami
struck the island from two
sides, more than 4,000
victims.
• Cause: nature, seismic waves,
• Local disaster,
• Global humanitarian aid.
• Today: evacuation plan, risk
management, etc. (adaptive
capacity strenghtened )

6. But.. Global threats and local effects
• Financial crisis 2007: cost
10-25 trillions 1012 USD
• Cause: man-humans -
global spread
• Today, higher regulation of
the financial sector,
monitoring, preventive
measures, warning systems,
etc.
• If there is resilience and
vulnerability, must be also
economic resilience and
economic vulnerability
Unemployment rate Slovakia
Far from the NYSE and Lehman Brothers

7. Resilience capacity*
*Developed by Kathryn A. Foster, the University of California, Berkeley.

8. Economic resilience
* Pendall, R., Foster, K. A. and Cowell, M. (2010) Resilience and Regions: Building Understanding of the Metaphor. Cambridge Journal
of Regions, Economy and Society
Product or employment
• Regional growth in output and
population or rates of
unemployment, poverty or labour
force participation can be considered
at least partly equilibrium
phenomena.*
• Economic resilience is the ability to
anticipate, prepare for, respond to,
and recover from a disturbance.
• The resistance of a system to
disturbances and the speed of return
to its pre-shock state (equilibrium)

9. -0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
-1.0
-0.5
0.0
0.5
1.0
1.5
2.0
2.5
3.0
Resilience capacity
Economic vulnerability
Slovakia
West of the country:
higher resilience capacity
and at the same time
higher relative change in
the unemployment –
vulnerability to global
economic shocks
closer to the European
economic core and
export oriented
(Volkswagen, KIA , Peugeot,
IBM, DHL, Hewlett Packard,
Samsung, etc.)
Hudec, O., Reggiani, A., Šiserová, M.: Resilience Capacity and Vulnerability: The Case of Slovakia, submitted to Region.

10. Economic vulnerability: unemployment
rate
Unemployment rate Slovakia
Unemployment rate Bratislava and Slovakia

11. The same with Adaptation to Climate Change
Global shocks  local resilience
• Climate change adaptation - an incentive for a real
change in a way to sustainability?
• Uncertainty in speed and scale of impact,
• Causal linkages between global effects and everyday life
are not visible,
• Socio-ecological systems – to puzzle out climate change
and to adapt is a critical challenge of our time, and will
drastically modify the way our societies function.
• Global risks and their typology:

12. Likehood and
impact of
global
threats
World Economic
Forum 2014

13. Interconnections
between the risks
World Economic forum, 2014

14. Increasing complexity
• Complexity.. Black swans, Butterfly effects: the wave of small
butterfly wings somewhere on one side of the globe can cause
drastic impact somewhere (Edward Lorenz, MIT, 1963)
• Geographical space is one of the playgrounds for complex dynamics
... dynamic phenomena have one feature in common: the low
predictability of uncertain interrelated events occurring at different
interconnected spatio-temporal scale levels and often originating
from different disciplinary backgrounds.*
• But local reactions: nature and society attempts to self-organise in a
chaotic world and there is a tendency towards a state of balance
(equilibria).
• Also, cities, social-ecological systems are getting more complex.
• M. Batty: to understand cities, we must view them not simply as
places in space but as systems of networks and flows. **
* Reggiani, A., Nijkamp, eds. P. Complexity and Spatial Networks: In Search of Simplicity, Springer, 2009
** Batty, M. The new science of cities, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2013

15. How to think about future? Not everything is a
black swan and not always there is a second serve possibility
slow-moving risks and disturbances and rapid, extreme events

16. The Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) Model (Dept. of
Environmental Sciences Louisiana State University) and many other
models.
Exposure. Vulnerability, Adaptability, mitigation to damages –
several possibilities for measures.

17. Different approaches to resilience
* Hassler U., Kohler N. (2014) Resilience in the built environment, Building Research & Information, 42:2, 119-129
Resilience was an implicit part of traditional construction knowledge
- oversizing of components and spaces, redundancy and reparability
were forms of tacit construction knowledge (Schön, 1983).
Different context of resilience: individual, physical system – material,
ecological system, social systems, economic system, disaster risk
management,...
Multidisciplinarity: built environment as social-ecological system,
includes manmade building and infrastructure stocks that constitute the
physical, natural, economic, social and cultural capital.*

18. The Three Main Definitions of Resilience
across various disciplines
Definition/Type Interpretation Main Fields of Use
1 Resilience as
‘bounce back’ from
shocks
System returns, ‘rebounds’, to
preshock state or path: emphasizes
speed and extent of recovery.
So-called ‘engineering resilience’, found in
physical sciences, some versions of ecology;
similar to ‘selfrestoring equilibrium dynamics’
in mainstream economics?
2 Resilience as
‘ability to absorb’
shocks
Emphasises stability of system
structure, function and identity in
the face of shocks“.. the capacity of
a system to absorb disturbance and
reorganize while undergoing change
so as to still retain essentially the
same function, structure, identity
and feedbacks.
So-called ‘extended ecological resilience’,
found in ecology and social ecology; similar to
multiple equilibrium economics? Too strong
shock can change economic structures, no
return to preshock state or path - pushed to a
new equilibrium state or path: the effect of
the shock is permanent - there is a memory of
the shock and hysteresis may occurre.
3 Resilience as
‘positive
adaptability’ in
anticipation of, or in
response to, shocks
Capacity of a system to maintain
core performances despite shocks
by adapting its structure, functions
and organization. Idea of ‘bounce
forward’ instead of bounce back,
adaptive resilience.
Found in psychological sciences (individuals)
and organisational theory; capacity to undergo
successful change in structures, functions and
behaviour; measures to minimise the impact of
any future reoccurrence of a shock. can be
linked with evolutionary economics? CAS:
complex adaptive systems theory - modularity
and redundancy
Martin, R., Sunley, P: On the notion of regional economic resilience: conceptualization and explanation, J Econ Geogr, 2014.

19. 4 basic possible
reactions
Y – regional
product or
employment
Hosp. pokles (a) Hosp. pokles (b)
Hosp. pokles (c) Hosp. pokles (d)
Produktnebozamestnanosť
Martin, R., Sunley, P: On the notion of regional economic resilience: conceptualization and explanation, J Econ Geogr, 2014.

20. Positive adaptability - robustness and
economics
• Modularity - a system structure which component subsystems or
elements are only partially or weakly connected or linked... if one
subsystem or element is affected by a shock, the effect remains
relatively contained and its diffusion throughout the whole system is
minimised.
• Although one module of a system may lack resilience, the system as
whole display robustness in the face of shocks.
• Robustness is higher if the failure of one module can be compensated
by others - redundancy : there are identical or similar components or
subsystems (modules) which can replace each other when one fails.
• Hard to translate it to social-economic systems, but an attention to
issues such as structural diversity, relational networks, related variety,
supply chains, food security, etc.
• And there is a question of self-organising and/or design of systems. How
to balance the perfect system design with self-organising dynamics?

21. Environment – sustainability – resilience
• Holling (1973) - the first definition: that is a measure of the persistence of
systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still
maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables
(Holling, Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems, 1973).
• Theoretical challenge of urban resilience to develop a multidisciplinary
theory that integrates a variety of urban dimensions such as social,
economic, cultural, environmental, spatial and physical infrastructure, into
a unified conceptual framework for understanding the resilience of cities
and how they should move towards a more resilient state.
• SHIFT OF CONCEPTS
Local Environment
protection
Sustainability Resilience
static systemic, linear or
circular processes of
growth
dynamic - adaptation added,
networks, self-renewal and survival,
to prepare for the un-projectable,
the impossible-to-imagine

22. Resilience concept, sustainability and
planning
• SHIFT: Sustainability can be made, but resilience happens ...
and than we need to trust the system we created to maintain
its elements and functions.
• RESILIENCE MEANS PLANNING THE FUTURE IN UNCERTAINTY
• Planning and uncertainty – not a best friends.
• Strategic concept of resilience: approaches from short-term
(re-)action to long-term strategy, from sectorial or individual
competition to collaboration*
• Resilient systems are defined in contrast to vulnerable systems
where, in the wake of exposure to external stresses, places
and/or systems suffer irreparable and irreversible damage.
* Stumpp E-M: New in town? On resilience and ‘‘Resilient Cities’’. Cities 32 (2013) 164–166

23. Adaptive capacity Schröter et al. (2004).

24. Resilient city planning framework
Y. Jabareen: Planning the resilient city: Concepts and strategies for coping with climate change and environmental risk Cities 31 (2013) 220–229

25. Governance capacities
• We do have a lack in institutions for flexible collaboration across
scales (regions, cities, neighbourhoods, infrastructure stocks).
• Land, strategic, crisis management and planning – different
worlds, goverments and self-government, sectors and territories,
• Identification and control of inter-scalar processes.
• Operational system: clear directions for institutions influencing
adaptive capacity and resilience allowing to coping with
uncertainty and surprise.
• The concept of resilience as a chance to address the long-term
evolution of the built environment and to combine different
approaches to planning, design, operation, management, value
and governance

26. Resilient city – City of resilience
• Resilient cities have built-in systems - built to adapt to change - a
diversity of transport and land-use systems, multiple sources of
renewable power.*
• Basic question for resilience: reaction to future (external) shock – what
happens to city under extreme stress.
• No „laboratories“ could exist to test the reactions, only previous
examples e.g in hazards (New Orleans, Phi Phi Island, Fukushima,...)
• divided city scenario - Detroit, Liverpool – resilient example,..
• resilient city scenario as necessity – CAS: modularity, redundancy - eco-
friendly, alternative forms of fuel, green, walkable centres, polycentric,
distributed – small scale systems, place-based.
• „Europe needs self-confident, resilient and sustainable regions and
cities.“**
* Gehl J. et al., New City Life (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2006).
** Opinion of the European economic and social Committee, European Parliament, 2009.

27. • From 2 million to 700 thousand
population
• From Fordism to post-fordism
• (modern ) times they are changin'
Detroit

28. o Rockefeller Foundation:
o Stresses: high unemployment; an overtaxed or inefficient public
transportation system; endemic violence; chronic food and water
shortages.
o How -by addressing both the shocks and the stresses, City
government, robust resilience strategy, access to solutions,
networking public, private, NGO and other resilient cities
o Extensive research has shown that resilient cities demonstrate
seven qualities: • Reflectiveness • Resourcefulness • Robustness
• Redundancy • Flexibility • Inclusiveness • Integration

29. Conclusions, overlaps, many questions
• Multidisciplinarity as a challenge to analyse and operationalise,
• RESILIENCE as redundancy, modularity, diversity in agents
(components) or connections,
• Urban planning – a change to adaptive strategic planning,
• Human Social System - close to comunity, organisation, social
capital, endogeneous concepts, LED,
• Resources, physical built in system – close to smart cities,
• COST of resilience: Resilience and robustness are abstract, very
costly public goods,
• Trade-off between well designed and self-organisation,
• Thank you for your attention, please answer the questions