Governing for Urban Resilience
Ruth Beilin (University of Melbourne)
Cathy
Wilkinson (Stockholm Resilience Centre)
Sue Parnell (University of Cape Town)
This Special
Issue (published May 2015, Volume 52/7) focuses on social-ecological resilience (SER) and urban governance. The
papers are case-based and analyse different practices (‘the doing’) of urban
SER which transcend scale and location, governments and governance. Locating
the action and understanding how it is constituted is a first step to
constructing data-bases, creating stories or reconstructing ways of knowing
places.
The papers question policies and
programs that are intended to shape the urban and highlight how SER can provide
impetus for shifting boundaries (connecting ecosystems, waterways, pathways,
buildings, species) to reinvigorate the spaces and occupation of the urban
(from an allotment garden to the peri-urban revegetation corridor). They also make visible the ecological,
social, engineering and economic systems that run through and contribute to the
dynamic forces of urban resilience.
Cross scale analysis becomes a way of interrogating this dynamism with
citizens and with institutions.
In the
research presented here, SER is part of issues of social justice, economic
sustainability, local knowledge and the way that these, coupled with memory,
can shift our understanding of the urban. SER is not confined to the city as
the urban has long transcended the visible infrastructure of its origins. Collectively, the research in this Issue seeks
to examine and support the radical social change needed to inspire citizen
discourse and contribute to the ‘doing’ that informs our urban futures.
