Ecological Resilience as a Foundation for Urban Design and Sustainability

Abstract

Cities are prototypical complex adaptive systems that are faced with a myriad of disturbances, most of which are unforeseen and unpredictable. Urban design principles are increasingly influenced by ecological ideas of heterogeneity, non-linearity, hierarchy, and multiple stable states. Ecological resilience has emerged as a major approach to understanding and managing social-ecological systems, including urban design. This theory suggests that, to design sustainable cities, our emphasis should be on creating and maintaining urban resilience – the ability of a city to persist without changing its basic structure, function, and identity. What underlies a truly resilient city is not how stable it has appeared, but whether it can withstand an unforeseen shock that would fundamentally alter or erase the city’s identity. For cities to be sustainable, urban design must explicitly account for the influence of both internal and external changes now and in the future.