Social Sustainability
Urban Resilience
The capacity of cities to survive, adapt and thrive amid shocks and stresses — from heatwaves to pandemics.
Definition
Urban resilience is the capacity of a city's systems — infrastructure, institutions, communities, economy — to absorb, recover from and adapt to acute shocks (floods, heatwaves, earthquakes, pandemics) and chronic stresses (water scarcity, inequality, aging infrastructure). Institutionalised by the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities programme (which created chief resilience officers in cities worldwide) and now embedded in climate adaptation planning, it integrates disaster preparedness with long-term adaptive capacity.
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