How Does the Concept of Resilient City Work in Practice? Planning and Achievements

In the past decade, resilient cities (RCs) have gained extensive attention in academic and political debates as a vision of urban futures. In particular, with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Resilient City 100 Program (RC100), a number of cities worldwide have pushed this concept forward from theory to practice through their RC plans/strategies. However, there is widespread doubt regarding how much this holistic idea of the future built environment contributes to urban practice. After developing a scoring evaluation matrix based on the synthesis of existing RC assessment frameworks, this review scrutinizes the plans, reports, city leaders’ speeches, official websites and academic reviews of five representative resilient cities and investigates their motivations, planning and achievements. The results demonstrate a huge theoretical and practical gap in RC: while RC plans attempt to expand as comprehensively as possible from cities’ initially narrow motivations, their achievements in implementation are limited. Although RC provides more holistic solutions to the cities, the limited resources mean that cities have to prioritize their urgent issues in their everyday practice. This paper calls for designating more feasible and specific features in RC visions and maintaining regular alignments from planning to actions in future RC practice.

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Concrete violence, indifference and future-making in Mozambique

Critique of Anthropology ◽

10.1177/0308275x20941573 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 0308275X2094157

Author(s):

Julie Soleil Archambault

Keyword(s):

Built Environment ◽

Fresh Concrete ◽

Economic Decline ◽

Affective Experience ◽

The Past ◽

The Future ◽

Concrete Blocks

In the Mozambican suburb of Inhapossa, piles of fresh concrete blocks vividly convey a sense of the momentous transformation under way in a place where building is now described as being ‘in fashion’. Exuding promises of a better future, this fresh concrete is emerging amidst the ruins of a not so distant violent past, in a country where the built environment has been scarred by decades of war, economic decline, neglect and vegetalization. If ruins are reminders of what once was or of what could have been, what do they become in a context of growing prosperity? The contrast between fresh and rotting concrete seemed to beg for anthropological attention, to call for an approach that would simultaneously capture the poetics and politics of concrete throughout its life and even longer afterlife. What my ethnography revealed, however, was that unlike the fresh concrete, which inspired songs and made people fall in love, the decaying concrete scattered across the suburb often inspired little more than indifference. By examining how Mozambicans remember the past and project themselves into the future through their engagement with the built environment, I propose to approach indifference neither as refusal to engage, nor simply as silence, and certainly not as political illiteracy, but rather as an affective experience in its own right that speaks of a particular orientation towards the future.

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Cyber Deterrence: The Past, Present, and Future

NL ARMS - NL ARMS Netherlands Annual Review of Military Studies 2020 ◽

10.1007/978-94-6265-419-8_20 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 385-400

Author(s):

Stefan Soesanto ◽

Max Smeets

Keyword(s):

International Security ◽

Alternative Form ◽

The Political ◽

Current Debate ◽

Historical Evolution ◽

Technical Aspects ◽

The Past ◽

Political Debates ◽

The Future ◽

Cyber Deterrence

AbstractThe question on whether and how deterring an adversary in or through cyberspace is feasible has provoked the minds of scholars and practitioners for decades. Today, cyber deterrence remains a quintessential anchoring concept for the political debates on cyber policy. However, does the concept of deterrence in cyberspace have a future when for almost three decades little to no seemingly feasible practical solutions nor an academic consensus have emerged? The purpose of this chapter is to situate the current debate on cyber deterrence within the historical evolution of deterrence thinking in cyberspace, clarify the existing conceptualizations, and comprehensively discuss whether the concept of cyber deterrence has an analytical future. We argue that the future deterrence debate can move into four directions: increased incorporation of cyber deterrence as an element within the broader international security and contest in a multi-domain world. A deeper focus on the technical aspects of the cyber domain to achieve deterrence effects on the operational and tactical level. A closer analysis of compellence, as the alternative form of coercion. And an exploration of new strategic concepts that seeks to contain and blunt adversarial aggression in cyberspace that stands apart from traditional deterrence thinking.

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