17

FROM MALADAPTATION
TO ADAPTATION
Towards a resilient urban planning paradigm
Jonathan Clarke

Introduction
On 26 October 2012, the tropical cyclone Hurricane Sandy, which had devastated communities
across the Caribbean, made landfall on the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States pushing
a major storm surge into the city of New York. The city’s scant flood walls and defences were
overwhelmed, flooding streets, tunnels, subway lines and, most notably, the city’s main energy
plants at Battery Park, which led to widespread electricity blackouts. This loss of power would
prove to be a ‘fracture-critical’ event, as hospitals lost power and much of the city was without
potable water, being reliant upon electricity for pumping.
Whilst only one life was lost within the city, the cost of damage was estimated at over $71.4
billion (2012 USD), and it is widely recognised that New York came close to a much more
serious disaster. Significantly, many of these impacts were predicted by a 2011 report, Responding
to Climate Change in New York State (ClimAID) (NYSERDA, 2011), which highlighted the
vulnerability of the city’s assets and in particular the poor siting of critical infrastructure. Despite
such dire warnings, policy makers had failed to act upon the findings and the city had suffered the
consequences. However, the event proved to be a wake-up call for politicians and city leaders;
since this time over $50 billion of funding has been invested in resilience initiatives (International
Business Times, 2014), but, more significantly, this action has been catalytic for urban resilience
internationally, with New York emerging as an exemplar for resilient design through a host of
innovative and best practice initiatives (Coaffee and Clarke, 2015). It is also illustrative of many of
the key arguments raised within this chapter, which reflects upon how cities can be reconfigured,
physically, socially and environmentally, to address a range of disruptive challenges and to
enhance resilience through learning from maladaptive urban design and planning practice.
In the last 15 years, the concept of resilience has emerged as a key consideration for urban
theorists, academics and policy makers, whilst the term is also an important source of discourse in
a diverse range of related fields (Coaffee, 2013a, 2013b; Davoudi, 2012; Walker and Cooper,
2011; Cote and Nightingale, 2012). Globally, this period has seen significant shock events,
disturbance and volatility with recent disasters, such as the Tohuku earthquake in 2011 or the
impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2005; these ‘Black Swan’ events illustrate the
vulnerability and potential weakness within the design, planning and management of contem-
porary cities, but perhaps also illuminate how we might enhance urban resilience in the future.

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Subsequently, the concept of resilience has been utilised as a means to consider a diverse range
of contemporary risks and stresses and, within the context of contemporary planning policy
and practice, offers a new and increasingly relevant set of ideas, tools and approaches to help
understand the complexities of an increasingly urbanised world (Coaffee et al., 2008; Davoudi
et al., 2013; Scott, 2013; Stumpp, 2013). In recent years, there has been a gradual shift to an
increasingly transdisciplinary concept of resilience that integrates the physical and socio-political
aspects of resilience and emphasises ‘joined-up’ approaches to decision-making. Moreover, the
growth in importance of ‘resilience’ has been underpinned by the political prioritisation of the
safety and security of communities against an array of perceived hazards and threats, ranging from
terrorism, disease pandemic and global warming-related flooding to stresses which serve to
weaken the fabric of everyday life, such as fiscal retrenchment and high rates of unemployment.
However, tensions continue to exist regarding the extent to which principles underpinning
resilience can become enmeshed within the formal planning processes of vulnerable urban areas.
Despite these issues of operationalising urban resilience in practice, there is a growing con-
sensus that resilience can be understood more broadly as the capacity to withstand and rebound
from a range of disruptive challenges, considered from the perspective of an evolving range of
contemporary risks (Walker and Broderick 2006; Leichenko, 2011; Scott, 2013; White, 2013;
Coaffee and Clarke, 2015). But the concept of resilience also has wider relevance, as Vale (2014,
p. 1) elaborates:

Resilience is, simultaneously, a theory about how systems can behave across scales, a
practice or proactive approach to planning systems that applies across social spaces, and
an analytical tool that enables researchers to examine how and why some systems are
able to respond to disruption.

However, despite the growing prevalence and sophistication of the term, there is also
acknowledgement that an ‘implementation gap’ exists between the theoretical conceptions of
resilience and how it can be utilised in practice (Coaffee and Clarke, 2015). Thus, there is a need
to further consider how the ongoing practice of urban planning and design practice can bridge
this gap.

The resilience turn in urban planning practice

Only in the last decade have ideas of resilience crept into urban policy debates, creating what is
termed ‘the urban resilience turn’ (Coaffee, 2013a; Imrie and Lees, 2014). Importantly, the ways
in which ideas and practices of resilience have emerged within such debates – and their relative
influence – are highly specific to the institutional contexts and emergent risks faced in particular
locations. Notably, international resilience priorities have been increasingly focused on cities
because of the particular vulnerability of densely populated political, economic and cultural
centres, the interdependencies of networked infrastructures, and as a result of continued and rapid
urbanisation (UN-HABITAT, 2011). These trends amplify the pressure upon cities to keep
citizens safe, healthy, prosperous and well informed. Whilst urban theorists promote cities’
agglomeration of innovation, creativity and economic resources (Glaeser, 2011; Florida, 2002), a
variety of threats to life, property and society also converge upon contemporary cities, by virtue of
their accumulation of population and critical infrastructure, as well as a lack of foresight in pre-
vious developmental regimes (Coaffee, 2009; Edwards, 2009; Fisher, 2012; Bosher et al., 2007).
In evidence of this, an agglomeration of urban risk, Godschalk (2003) identified the world-
wide impact of natural disasters in 2001 as resulting in 25,000 deaths, $36 billion in economic

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losses and $11.5 billion in insured losses. Recent years have also seen the cost of urban disasters
mounting (Zolli and Healey, 2013). Specifically, Fisher (2012, p. 3) highlights the dramatic
increase in ‘weather-related catastrophes’, such as floods, storms and drought, the occurrence
of which has increased by over 400 times in the time period from 1900 to 2005. Consequently,
issues surrounding water are often the critical vulnerability within the contemporary city; at
present there are one billion people living on land vulnerable to flooding, but that figure is set to
rise to two billion by 2050, with the cities of the developing world being particularly vulnerable
(Fisher, 2012; UN-HABITAT, 2011; Rockerfeller Foundation, 2013).
Highlighting these global vulnerabilities to extreme weather, an influential Royal Society
(The Royal Society, 2014, p.7) report, makes a number of recommendations to address the
convergence of population and climate change risks, through planning and preparedness, pro-
tecting people and assets, and, critically, using evidence to inform decision-making:

Societies are not resilient to extreme weather today. To reduce this resilience deficit
action needs to be taken by the international community, governments, local
policymakers, the private sector and non-governmental organisations. Lessons can be
learnt from past events.

Accordingly, the strengthening of the built environment emerges as a critical focus for wider
societal resilience. As Helen Molin Valdes (Valdes et al., 2013, p. 50), writing as the Deputy
Director of the UNISDR, observed:

the built environment acts as the core in every city and facilitates the everyday life of
human beings. Any destruction to the built environment disturbs the functioning of
the human society, and economic and social development of the country due to its
strong connection with the human activities.

This quote highlights the importance of the built environment’s role in supplying citizens
with essential services and this understanding has led to the recent array of philanthropic and
commercial attempts to develop strategic evaluation frameworks to assess urban resilience. For
example, the UNISDR’s Making Cities Resilient campaign (UNISDR, 2012) aims to support
public decision-making in urban affairs, whilst the World Bank has produced guidance –
Building Urban Resilience in East Asia (World Bank, 2012) – which aims to increase the resi-
lience of cities to disasters and climate change impacts by using a risk-based approach in the public
investment decision-making process. Moreover, in Siemens (2013) and Arup (2014) produced
city resilience ‘toolkits’ that highlight a number of factors that city leaders should consider
when making decisions about urban resilience interventions, whilst in 2013 the Rockefeller
Foundation launched their 100 Resilient Cities campaign ‘dedicated to helping cities around the
world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing
part of the 21st century’ (Rockefeller, 2013b). Such approaches highlight how an overarching
and strategic view of planning-based resilience needs to consider not only the material built
environment but also social economic and decision-making processes. It could also be argued
that these entrepreneurial or commercial approaches to resilience offer some support to the
hypothesis outlined elsewhere within this volume, that resilience is increasingly a tool of global
neoliberal forces.
Recent work within the evolving field of urban resilience (Coaffee et al., 2008; Bosher,
2008; Ahern, 2011; Coaffee, 2013b; Bosher, 2014; Chelleri et al., 2015; Coaffee and Lee, 2016)
has coalesced around a number of key requirements for implementing enhanced resilience

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within the built environment. First, the resilience turn has ushered in a greater requirement
for foresight and preparedness; this includes making plans and accommodation for foreseeable
events, but also building more general capacity for coping with an uncertain future that
requires new methods of risk assessment and management. Second, there is a requirement to
consider multiple risks and hazards in a holistic fashion; developing planning policy and
practice that can respond in a flexible and integrated fashion to multiple risks across a range of
scales has been encouraged. Third, a focus upon the changing organisation and institutio-
nalisation of the resilience response has become paramount in embedding resiliency principles
within planning policy and practice. As such, new governance approaches to enhancing urban
resilience emphasise joined-up and collaborative approaches to decision-making that break
down professional and practice siloes. Thus where traditional approaches to urban risk have
relied upon a narrow range of stakeholders, progressive approaches will need to be more
deliberative, drawing a fuller range of professional and community groups into decision-
making at a variety of spatial scales, from locally coordinated systems to centralised and sub-
national organisations (Coaffee et al. 2008, Coaffee and Clarke, 2015). From a spatial planning
perspective, resilience is a continuous journey of improvement, but one that helps define the
problems at hand and develop planning processes to mitigate emergent issues through
adaptation, innovation and cooperation; mirroring Vale’s (2014) observations on the multiple
utility of the term.
It can thus be said that resilience represents the environmental, social and technical science of
persistence and adaptation. Critical to this advancing sophistication of resilience understanding
is the engagement with ‘complexity’, which has moved the conception of resilience beyond
ecological theory and shock response to a governance approach that engages and proactively
manages our dynamic world (Chandler, 2012; Zolli and Healey, 2013). Governance, according
to Healey (1997), is the way we manage common affairs through formal decision-making
institutions, complemented by informal networks. But governance also describes a style of
governing, where formal power moves away from traditional forms of government towards a
network of other stakeholders (Rydin, 2010; Nuissl and Heinrichs, 2011). Within this context,
the complexity of engaged stakeholders and the potential for disruptive hazard is a significant
challenge to governance operation. In his critique of resilience as a means to manage increased
complexity, Chandler (2014) argues that the complexity is a conceptualisation of ‘uncertainty’
and the limits of what can be scientifically quantified, which has increasingly become important
since the 1920s. More widely, he argues that this understanding is itself a critique of liberal
forms of ‘top-down’ government, an alternative to neoliberal approaches, and that an under-
standing of the medium of complexity offers the secret to new forms of governance. Within the
traditionally technical disciplines of engineering and risk management, these notions of social
complexity, interdependency and future uncertainty are increasingly challenging traditional,
techno-rationale risk management approaches and fostering an interest in more open-ended,
forward-looking and socially informed resilience methods (Suter, 2011; Linkov et al., 2014;
Baum, 2015).

Designing for resilience

This understanding around the complexity of the potential medium for resilience and thus
the need for to see resilience enhancement as an ongoing reflexive process, has close parallels
to recent developments in urban design and planning; most notably Carmona’s (2014) ‘place-
shaping continuum’, which understands urbanism and urban development as part of a
much larger and longer-term process. Within this context, celebrated designer and landscape

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urbanist, James Corner (2004, p. 1) elaborates further on the importance of these corresponding
understandings:

In order to grow and develop, life forms must both persist and adapt, their organizational
structures sufficiently resilient to withstand challenges while also supple enough to
morph and reorganize. These principles are as topical today in business and management
as they are in biology and ecology, urbanism and the design of public space.

Design-based approaches have further relevance within the context of a complex and changeable
world, where ongoing learning is critical. Conventionally our ways of knowing and reasoning
have followed ‘inductive’ or ‘deductive’ approaches; broadly using established theory as a means
to explain practice, or using observations of practice as a means to stimulate new theory.
However, there is another, more sparsely utilised approach, ‘abductive’ reasoning, which Walton
(2001, p. 143) defines as ‘a kind of guessing by a process of forming a plausible hypothesis that
explains a given set of facts or data’.
Abductive methods are often associated with approaches that begin with a solution or
proposition, and then work backwards towards a rationale or explanation, as is often the case in
design practice. This kind of intelligent guesswork or informed intuition is often most applicable
when there is incomplete knowledge of the system of study (Walton, 2001), making it par-
ticularly relevant for the complex systems that are the medium of resilience work, and in par-
ticular the built environment. It could be said that the nature of the design process and the
complexity of design factors requiring consideration mean that every new design is a form of
experimentation and every design solution is to some extent fallible (Fisher, 2012). In explanation
of this Lawson (2005, p. 143) highlights how, in contrast to how conventional rationalities
require deductive and interpolative skills, design’s unique feature is how it merges these with
‘divergent’ approaches that utilise ‘an open-ended approach seeking alternatives where there is no
clearly correct answer’. As Fisher (2012, p. 177) further articulates on the role of abduction within
the design process:

Such lateral or analogical thinking involves a form of induction, in that it draws

conclusions from observed phenomena. But unlike induction, it doesn’t seek universal
laws or general principles, instead it connects particular things in order to solve specific
problems in a given time and space.

Therefore, in contrast to the early theoretical conceptions of resilience, which largely utilised a
deductive approach based upon ecological models (Holling, 1973, 1986; Gunderson and Holling,
2002), new forms of resilience practice need to focus upon grounded, inductive learning from
practice, with the open-ended process of design used as a medium to interrogate different pos-
sibilities, and utilising abductive methods to establish different adaptive pathways.

Fracture-criticality and maladaptive planning

Why is it in hindsight that planners are often seen to make poor decisions that increase, rather than
reduce, risk to local communities? In his book on the challenge of resilient design, Thomas Fisher
(2012) argued that disasters are caused by ‘design errors’, and thus the key to a more resilient built
environment is to learn from these earlier incidents. He (2012, p. ii) uses the 2007 collapse of the
I-35W bridge in Minnesota to illustrate a key design problem, which he refers to as ‘fracture-
critical design’: ‘This is design in which structures have so little redundancy and so much

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interconnectedness and misguided efficiency that they fail completely if any one part does not
perform as required.’
Fisher’s (2012) concept of fracture-critical design describes a development that is vulnerable to
linked systematic failures and catastrophic collapse, also vividly illustrated by the events in New
Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. However, the examples of design weaknesses identified
within the study display a variety of scales of impact and hint that another conception is needed to
fully encapsulate ways in which the built environment can lack resilience. Accordingly, the UN-
HABITAT (2011) report on global settlement suggests another potentially helpful understanding:

There are also actions and investments actions and investments that increase rather than
reduce risk and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change and these are termed
maladaptation. : : : Removing maladaptations and the factors that underpin them are
often among the first tasks to be addressed before new adaptations (emphasis added).

Within the context of climate change, maladaptation is generally understood to mean an act of
adaption that makes the situation worse (Barnett and O’Neill 2010). However, within the term’s
behavioural sciences origins, maladaptive behaviour is understood to mean simply, ‘inappro-
priate’, ‘inflexible’ and ‘counterproductive’, and often occurs as a result of adapting to an earlier
situation that is now no longer applicable (Supkoff, 2012). Thus design that is no longer fit for
purpose, has reached functional obsolescence, and increases wider vulnerability could be said to
be maladaptive (Fisher, 2012).
Barnett and O’Neill (2010, p.211) provide five definitions of climate change maladaptation;
these are listed in Table 17.1 below, alongside a wider interpretation of the concept:
Notably, these maladaptations within the urban design and development process, most often
display a failure to change to new circumstances or a shifting risk landscape, further reinforcing
the need to see the design and governance of the built environment as part of a continual process,
rather than a one-off action (Carmona, 2014). Accordingly, the concepts of adaptation and
adaptive capacity are increasingly recognised as critical to both wider resilience (Zolli and Healey,
2013), and in particular the challenges posed by man-made climate change. The most recent
Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change (IPCC, 2014) used the concept of adaptive
capacity to represent the ability to adapt to the impacts and changing requirements of climate
change. A broader-ranging definition is provided by Jones et al. (2010, p. 2), who highlight that:

adaptive capacity denotes the ability of a system to adjust, modify or change its
characteristics or actions to moderate potential damage, take advantage of opportunities
or cope with the consequences of shock or stress.

It is notable that this definition also identifies the opportunities inherent in seeking adaption,
whilst there is increasing acknowledgement of how adaptive measures are more contextual, site

Table 17.1 Definitions of maladaptation

Climate change (Barnett and O’Neill, 2010) Built environment (Authors own)

Increasing emissions of greenhouse gases Increases vulnerability

Disproportionately burdening the most vulnerable Transfers responsibility to vulnerable stakeholders
High opportunity costs Disproportionate approach
Reduce incentive to adapt Fails to adapt
Path dependency Locked-in

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specific and relevant at a local level (Galderisi and Ferrara, 2012). These understandings reinforce
the importance of challenging maladaptive design at a range of scales, but also the potential
benefits of promoting wider adaptation and adaptive capacity building within the urban planning
and design professions more locally.
However, in this push to eliminate weakness and failure, there is a danger of stifling the very
innovation necessary for building adaptive capacity; if, as Cross (1982) suggests that the central
concern of design is ‘the conception and realisation of new things’, it appears ideally suited
to the change paradigm offered by resilience. In this context, we need to find new ways of
promoting innovation and adaptive capacity through design, within the complex arena of the
built environment.
The behaviour of planners towards the goal of enhancing resilience is, like all planning
operations, highly related to organisational context and can have a huge effect on the ability of the
planning system, or individual planners, to act effectively to mitigate the impact of disruptive
challenge. Sometimes planners fail to act and adapt to changing circumstances where new risk and
threats emerge and on other occasions planning responses might be deemed inappropriate or
inflexible. If we consider such behaviour to be often maladaptive, then we can see why planning
authorities with their often-siloed ways of working, a focus on short-termism, change averseness
and fragmentation of roles, combined with the constant necessity for up-skilling and retraining to
enhance the knowledge of available options, have struggled to fully absorb and action much-
needed resilience requirements.
These understandings reinforce the importance of challenging maladaptation on a range of
scales, but also the potential benefits of promoting wider adaption and adaptive capacity building
within the urban planning and design professions more locally, so that planners and the planning
system can better adapt to changing circumstances by modifying behaviour, actions or plans
according to current and future need.

Closing the implementation gap

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy’s impact upon New York, there have been a number of pub-
lications and reports which have shed further light on the failings that led to the disaster; in
particular highlighting that if the recommendations for mitigation contained within the ClimAid
(NYSERDA, 2011) report had been acted upon, much of the damage to the city could have been
averted (NYS 2012). The maladaptions and design weaknesses highlighted within this study
around the location and protection of New York’s critical infrastructure, are substantiated by
successive publications including Redlener and Reilly (2012), which notes the ‘fragility’ of the
city’s power systems as a result of inappropriate siting, before highlighting the massive exposure of
healthcare facilities to future flood events. Similarly, a study by Wagner et al. (2014) emphasises the
problem of poor land uses and unsuitable development locations, which exacerbated the event,
driven by flawed risk management processes; it is suggested that the US has been stuck in a ‘cost
analysis’ model for infrastructure investment and that given the low probability of events
occurring, decision-makers were unwilling to act, despite the potential exposure of lives and assets.
From the perspective of design, New York’s recent Rebuild by Design initiative, which aims to
promote resilience through transformative design and planning, is both innovative and more
widely relevant to future resilience practice. Initially an open ideas competition, it has seen six
winning entries developed towards potential implementation, whilst gaining widespread media
coverage and critical praise (Rebuild by Design, 2014). Despite the wide- ranging remit and
architectural focus of the competition entrants, who include design luminaries such as Rem
Koolhaas, all designs utilise some form of green infrastructure.

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 Jonathan Clarke

Amongst the successful entries, the project which has attracted most attention is BIG
Architecture’s DryLine; inspired by the Highline, it aims to convert the ten miles of Manhattan’s
hard shoreline, with its bridges and infrastructure, into a continuous network of landscape buffers
and ‘protective parks’ (The Guardian, 2014a, 2014b; rebuild by Design, 2014). Developed by
Danish architect Bjarke Ingles, the approach is based upon extensive analysis of Manhattan’s
vulnerabilities and exposure to flood, as well as studies of historic land use that show how the
development of Manhattan has encroached onto the shoreline that once buffered against such
events. The design incorporates a system of levees, dams and floodwalls, which improves
resistance to flood events, integrated within a linear public park that finds imaginative uses for the
resultant spaces.
Whilst none of the proposed elements are revolutionary in isolation, the Dryline represents a
new relationship with critical infrastructure; developed with an understanding of localised risk,
but weaving in new social and environmental benefits in an holistic manner. The Dryline
challenges the assumption that flood infrastructure has to be detrimental to urban character and
highlights the co-benefits of considering issues of urban design and enhanced resilience in unison.
Despite this notable example, the majority of work in the burgeoning field of urban resilience
is seldom grounded within the everyday practices of planners. In the early years of the twenty-first
century the rhetoric of resilience has abounded in policy and government narratives surrounding
cities and planning – with Time magazine famously giving it the distinction of buzzword of the
year in 2013 (Walsh, 2013). Here the focus was on the use of resilience as a new form of risk
management to cope with the complexities of large integrated systems and reflecting an overall
consensus about the necessity of adaptation to the uncertainty of future threats. Now that such a
consensus has been reached it, is vital that planners begin implementing resilience rather than just
highlighting its merits, and in so doing transforming urban resilience practice.
This point echoes Brown’s (2013) analysis of climate change policies, which has highlighted
the predominance of incremental approaches that support the status quo, rather than enacting
transformative change, which is often necessary to encourage more long-term resilience. In
further evidence of this, Pelling and Manuel-Navarrete (2011) observed that the political chal-
lenge of adjusting to a changing climate is made more difficult by path dependencies, associated
impacts upon development norms and governance structures. Accordingly, UN-HABITAT
(2011, p. 27) have found that the response of cities to the new challenges presented by anthro-
pogenic climate have been fragmented, with significant gaps between the rhetoric and the realities
of action on the ground. These climate change examples demonstrate the need to integrate more
long-term thinking and innovation into transformative urban design and planning practice.
Moving from rhetoric to implementation in urban resiliency is therefore not without its
challenges. Today’s urban design and planning practice is increasingly seen as a remedy to an ever-
increasing array of socio-economic problems, policy priorities and risks facing contemporary
society for which resilient responses are required. Yet in an era of austerity, this must be delivered
with fewer resources. Despite this, resilience is becoming incrementally embedded as a focus for
envisioning future strategic planning and more localised place-making activities, which planners
are increasingly adopting as part of their modus operandi. In evidence of this, in the recently
released UK National Planning Policy Framework (DCLG, 2012), it is articulated that Local
Planning Authorities should:

work with local advisors and others to ensure that they have and take into account the
most up-to-date information about higher risk sites in their area for malicious threats
and natural hazards, including steps that can be taken to reduce vulnerability and
increase resilience.

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In spite of this overarching policy requirement for resilience, the UK’s winter flooding of 2015,
coming so soon after major flooding in 2013 and 2014, suggests that lessons are not being learned.
What is clear from debates about urban resilience is that planners cannot function in isolation and
must be part of a more integrated urban management nexus, with design approaches utilised to
provide adaptive pathways. Although it is relatively easy to highlight an institutional inertia within a
range of built environment stakeholders as a barrier to collaborative working in resiliency until now
(Bosher and Coaffee, 2008; Coaffee and Bosher, 2008), we should not forget the key role that
education can play in better aligning practice within this crucial area. The importance of training and
skills development to raise awareness of options that are available to all built environment pro-
fessionals involved in the decision-making process, or that hold a stake in developments is vital
(Chmutina et al., 2014). This can come through student-centred courses or through continual
professional development, where design and adaptive capacity skills can be forged in a multi-
disciplinary and multi-professional environment, mirroring the complex reality of urban resilience
problems on the ground. Whilst the UK and many other countries have been slow to adopt such an
integrated approach, we can look to the recently emerging US model to see what might be achieved
in training a range of built environment professionals to deliver pre-emptive urban resilience. In
May 2014, a collective industry statement on implementing urban resilience was signed by repre-
sentatives of the US’ design and construction industry (including the bodies for planners, architects,
chartered surveyors, interior designers, landscape architects, engineering) which noted that:

contemporary planning, building materials, and design, construction and operational

techniques can make our communities more resilient to these threats. : : : Together,
our organizations are committed to build a more resilient future.
(AIA, 2014)

Within this context, it has been argued that the key to expanding urban resilience praxis is
learning and embracing systematic change. Thus within the fields of urban design and planning,
this involves learning from practice and past failures as a means to inform future design solutions
and transformative adaptation (Fisher, 2012). Similarly, from the perspective of urban govern-
ance, there is a growing understanding that earlier policy failures offer learning opportunities
about their ‘emergent interconnections’ in a complex world, an understanding of which allows
for more integrative urban policy (Chandler, 2014).
It can be concluded that resilience should be seen as a continuous journey that helps us to
define the problems at hand but also to develop more wide-reaching design solutions that mit-
igate emergent issues through adaptation, innovation and collaboration. Orchestrating a
coherently joined-up approach to enhancing the resilience of our cities, to meet the rising threat
of anthropogenic climate change and other unforeseen risks, may be the greatest challenge of our
generation (Coaffee and Clarke, 2015). It can only be overcome if urban planning and design
practitioners come together with academic theoreticians, moving from maladaption to trans-
formative adaptation.

Acknowledgements
This Chapter expands upon themes first published as Coaffee and Clarke (2015), and draws from
research conducted during the HARMONISE project (A Holistic Approach to Resilience and
Systematic Actions to Make Large Scale Urban Built Infrastructure Secure), which has received
funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological
development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 312013.

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