Social equity in urban resilience planning

Bibliographic Data

ID19602048
AuthorsMeerow (0000-0002-6935-1832, Arizona State University, corresponding author), Pani Pajouhesh (0000-0002-1465-1547, University of Toronto), Thomas R Miller (0000-0002-1692-5839, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA)
Year2019
Volume24
Issue9
Pages793-808
Publication date2019-07-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLocal Environment (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1354-9839 • E-ISSN: 1469-6711
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13549839.2019.1645103
OpenAlexW2963055462
LanguageEN
Citations received177
References cited44

A growing number of cities are incorporating resilience into their plans and policies to respond to shocks, stresses, and uncertainties. While some scholars advocate for the potential of resilience research and practice, others argue that it promotes an inherently conservative and neoliberal agenda, prevents systemic transformations, and pays insufficient attention to power, politics, and justice. Notably, critics of the urban resilience agenda argue that policies fail to adequately address social equity issues. This study seeks to inform these debates by providing a cross-sectional analysis of how issues of equity are incorporated into urban resilience planning. We develop a tripartite framework of equity that includes distributional, recognitional, and procedural dimensions and use it to analyse the goals, priorities, and strategies of formal resilience plans created by member cities of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme. Our analysis reveals considerable variation in the extent to which cities focus on equity, implying that resilience may be more nuanced than some critics suggest. There are, however, clear areas for improvement. Dominant conceptions of equity are generally tied to a distributional orientation, with less focus on the recognitional and procedural dimensions. We hope our conceptual framework and lessons learned from this study can inform more just resilience planning and provide a foundation for future research on the equity implications of resilience

Economics · Political science · Politics · Psychological resilience · Public economics · Public relations · Sociology · Urban planning · Urban resilience · Community Health and Development · Disaster Management and Resilience · Law · Psychology · Regional resilience and development · Social Psychology