برنامه ریزی شهر مقاوم : مفاهیم و استراتژی برای مقابله با تغییرات آب و هوا و خطر زیست محیطی

This paper contributes to filling the theoretical and practical gaps of city resilience literature, which lacks multifaceted theorizing and typically overlooks the multidisciplinary and complex nature of urban resilience. Furthermore, most studies on the subject make use of general, vague, and confusing terminology. This paper suggests a new innovative conceptual framework (the Resilient City Planning Framework or RCPF) that addresses the critical question of what cities and their urban communities should do in order to move towards a more resilient state in the future. Accordingly, the RCPF takes complexity and uncertainty into account. It is affected by a multiplicity of economic, social, spatial, and physical factors and its planning involves a wide range of stakeholders. RCPF is a network of four interlinked concepts that together, provide a comprehensive understanding of City Resilience.

In recent years, we have become increasingly aware of the huge risks that climate change poses to our cities. Climate change is likely to bring higher temperatures, sea level increase, more intense rainstorms, droughts and heat waves. It also poses particular threats to urban infrastructures. To name just a few, these include increased strains on materials and equipment, higher peak electricity loads and voltage fluctuations, transport disruptions, and increased need for emergency management (IPCC, 2007 and NPCC, 2009; Wardekker et al., 2003). Furthermore, we have recently witnessed how natural disasters have cost lives and destroyed urban spaces and communities (Munn-Venn & Archibald, 2007). The tsunami and earthquake in Japan, the tsunami in the Indonesian island of Sumatra, and the flood covering large areas in Pakistan and Australia, which have taken tens of thousands of lives, are just a few among many tragic disasters. Importantly, the issue at stake is not the climate change impacts alone but “…a whole spectrum of global environmental changes that interplay with interdependent and rapidly globalizing human societies” (Folke et al., 2011) and the resulting risks that human settlements and humanity in general may face. It is clear that, in order to reduce the risk and impact of these threats and to increase the safety and wellbeing of their residents, cities and their communities must be more resilient and prepared to address the threats head-on. If they are not, their urban communities will live under continuous threat, and more and more will become vulnerable to risks (UNISDR, 2010). The critical question is, how resilient are contemporary cities and their different communities, and are they ready to face a multiplicity of challenges and uncertainties in the future? Most importantly, what should cities and urban communities do, at the present, in order to move from a vulnerable to a more resilient state? Moreover, since human action contributes to the altering of the ecosystem locally and globally (Chapin et al., 2011 and Folke et al., 2011), how resilient should cities be in order to contribute to environmental protection and sustainability? Although a literature review reveals an important emerging scholarship on urban resilience, most studies on the subject make use of general, vague, and confusing terminology, and fail to conceptualize and theorize the phenomenon in a systematic manner. Therefore, this paper aims to fill the theoretical and practical gaps and answer the critical question regarding what cities and their urban communities should do in order to move towards a more resilient future state.

This paper elaborated a new conceptual framework (the Resilient City Planning Framework; RCPF) that addresses the critical question of what cities and their urban communities should do in order to move towards a more resilient state in the future. Accordingly, Resilient City Planning Framework (RCPF) is defined as a network, or a theoretical plane of interlinked concepts, that provides a comprehensive understanding of City Resilience. The Resilient City Planning Framework is composed of four concepts. As described in this paper, each concept consists of specific components that define its nature and assess its contribution to the framework. The contribution of each concept to the framework of urban resilience is the sum of the contributions of its measurable components. Even though various measurement techniques may already exist for some of these components, a systematic approach to the measurement of all components should be prioritized in future research. Each one of the four Resilient City Framework concepts has specific roles and domain in the RCT framework as seen in Fig. 1 and Table 1. The ‘Urban vulnerability matrix analysis’ focuses on the governance culture, processes, arena and roles of the resilient city. This concept is critical and significant for the resilient city for its contribution to the spatial and socio-economic mapping of future risks and vulnerabilities. The ‘Urban governance’ concept contributes to the holistic management of urban resilience. It focuses on urban policies and assumes that there is a significant need for a new approach to urban governance in order to cope with uncertainties and future environmental and climate change impact challenges. Urban governance suggests that the integrative governance approach, deliberative and communicative decision making measures, and ecological economics have a great impact on moving our cities towards improved urban resiliency. The concept of ‘prevention’ represents the various components that should be considered in order to contribute to the prevention of environmental hazards and climate change impacts. These components include mitigation measures, adaptation of clean energy, and urban restructuring methods. The fourth concept, ‘uncertainty oriented planning’, demonstrates that planning should adapt its methods in order to help cities cope with uncertainties in the future. Resilient City Framework, the framework for City Resilience and Community Resilience, is a complex phenomenon, non-deterministic, dynamic in structure, and uncertain in nature. It is affected by a multiplicity of economic, social, spatial, and physical factors and its planning involves a wide range of stakeholders. It is important to mention that the proposed RCPF is not a deterministic framework, but a dynamic and flexible one that could be modified while respecting its fundamental concepts. According to the Resilient City Framework, a resilient city is defined by the overall abilities of its governance, physical, economic and social systems and entities exposed to hazards to learn, be ready in advance, plan for uncertainties, resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions.