What Can We Learn from Urban Crisis?

The irreversible transition towards urban living entails complex challenges and vulnerabilities for citizens, civic authorities, and the management of global commons. Many cities remain beset by political, infrastructural, social, or economic fragility, with crisis arguably becoming an increasingly present condition of urban life. While acknowledging the intense vulnerabilities that cities can face, this article contends that innovative, flexible, and often ground-breaking policies, practices, and activities designed to manage and overcome fragility can emerge in cities beset by crisis. We argue that a deeper understanding of such practices and the knowledge emerging from contexts of urban crisis may offer important insights to support urban resilience and sustainable development. We outline a simple conceptual representation of the interrelationships between urban crisis and knowledge production, situate this in the context of literature on resilience, sustainability, and crisis, and present illustrative examples of real-world practices. In discussing these perspectives, we reflect on how we may better value, use, and exchange knowledge and practice in order to address current and future urban challenges.

Global Trends in Urban Agriculture Research: A Pathway toward Urban Resilience and Sustainability

Urban agriculture has been proposed as an important urban element to deal with the challenges of food insecurity and environmental deterioration. In order to track current popular topics and global research trends in urban agriculture, we used bibliometric analysis and visualization mapping to evaluate and analyze the developments in the knowledge of urban agriculture based on 605 papers from the core collection database Web of Science from 2001–2021. The results were as follows. (1) The number of urban agriculture publications increased substantially year by year, indicating that the field is attracting increasing attention. The University of Kassel, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and University of Freiburg are the most productive research institutions in the field of urban agriculture. The top-five most influential countries are the Unites States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and China, of which the Unites States plays a central role in the cooperative linkage between countries. (2) Research on urban agriculture focuses not only on food production and different styles but also on how to realize the various functions of urban agriculture. In addition, UA-related sustainability and the water-energy-food nexus have become two emerging research topics. (3) Urban agriculture does not necessarily mean a resource-conserving and environmentally friendly food system. To achieve sustainable development, a transition based on technological innovation is needed. How to improve the sustainable development level of the food system while fully considering the resilience, sustainability, and versatility of urban agriculture is the main direction of future research.

Assessment of Urban Resiliency Concerning Disaster Risk: A Review on Multi- Dimensional Approaches

There have been a number of new research published with different methodologies and frameworks in recent years, aimed at improving city resilience to a variety of man-made and natural calamities. As climate change progresses, resilience will become a more important topic in scientific and policy circles that influence future urban development. This review article first provides the definition of resilience. Then it represents some of the adopted methodologies in an extensive way. Approaches including Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC), Climate Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI), Disaster resilience index based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Composite indicator based approach, Hyogo Framework and so on. This section discusses about urban resiliency assessments to mitigate vulnerability, offer a set of principles and indicators for creating an urban resilience assessment tool. Findings of this study not only address a variety of qualitative and quantitative aspects of urban resilience but also describes about different indicators such as environmental resources, socio-economic and built environment, infrastructure, governance and institutional indicators. Journal of Engineering Science 12(3), 2021, 111-125

Bringing Transition Management to Cities: Building Skills for Transformative Urban Governance

Cities are open to trialing new approaches for advancing their planning and urban governance practice. Evidence from urban research and practice shows that transition management has been widely and diversely applied for strategic planning for climate mitigation and adaptation, regeneration, as well as sectoral (energy, water, waste) and social cohesion agendas. Despite the amounting evidence of the applications of transition management, the research has not identified what it is required in terms of skills to apply such a governance framework for participatory governance in cities. In this paper, we respond to this gap by providing evidence from 11 cities across Europe that applied transition management as an approach to participatory urban governance for unpacking what transformative actions are required to strengthen urban resilience in deprived neighborhoods. Our multi-case study research and analysis reveals that a multitude of vocational and academic skills are required for the application of transition management approach including systems thinking, creativity, theory-to-practice application skills, diplomatic skills for forging partnerships and learning alliances and openness to learning-by-doing during experimentation. Transition management application in cities in the Resilient Europe project brought about positive outcomes in terms of developing new skills, embedding new knowledge about urban resilience and transition management in planning.

Smart Grid Topologies Paving the Way for an Urban Resilient Continuity Management

The generation and supply of electricity is currently about to undergo a fundamental transition that includes extensive development of smart grids. Smart grids are huge and complex networks consisting of a vast number of devices and entities which are connected with each other. This opens new variations of disruption scenarios which can increase the vulnerability of a power distribution network. However, the network topology of a smart grid has significant effects on urban resilience particularly referring to the adequate provision of infrastructures. Thus, topology massively codetermines the degree of urban resilience, i.e. different topologies enable different strategies of power distribution. Therefore, this article introduces a concept of criticality adapted to a power system relying on an advanced metering infrastructure. The authors propose a two-stage operationalization of this concept that refers to the design phase of a smart grid and its operation mode, targeting at an urban resilient power flow during power shortage.