Urban Resilience in a Global Context

Dorothee Brantz, Avi Sharma (eds.) Urban Resilience in a Global Context Urban Studies For Anika and Felix Dorothee Brantz is a professor of urban environmental history and the director of the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technische Universität Berlin. Her research interests include urban environmental history, the history of war and peace, and the different temporalities of the urban. Avi Sharma is a senior research fellow and assistant professor at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technische Universität Berlin. Sharma is particularly interested in irregular migration, urban and environmental histories. His ongo- ing work explores urban cases in postwar Germany and post-Partition South Asia. Dorothee Brantz, Avi Sharma (eds.) Urban Resilience in a Global Context Actors, Narratives, and Temporalities Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National- bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeri- vatives 4.0 (BY-NC-ND) which means that the text may be used for non-commercial pur- poses, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ To create an adaptation, translation, or derivative of the original work and for commercial use, further permission is required and can be obtained by contacting rights@transcript- publishing.com Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. © 2020 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Dorothee Brantz Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5018-1 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5018-5 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839450185 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper. Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................. 7 I) Introduction Contesting Resilience Negotiating Shared Urban Futures Dorothee Brantz and Avi Sharma .......................................................... 11 II) Ecologies of Resilience A Historical Perspective on Resilient Urbanism The ‘Sociobiology of Cities’ and ‘Ecosystem Urbs’ in Belgium, 1900-1980 Koenraad Danneels, Bruno Notteboom and Greet De Block................................. 35 North of the Arctic Circle Ralph Erskine’s Mid-20thCentury Urban Planning and Design Projects in Kiruna and Svappavaara Ann Maudsley ............................................................................ 57 Growing Resilient Cities Urban Community Gardens and Disaster Recovery after the 2010/11 Canterbury/Christchurch Earthquakes Andreas Wesener ........................................................................ 77 Before ‘Resilience’ Surviving in Postwar Berlin, 1945-1950 Avi Sharma .............................................................................. 101 III) Infrastructures of Resilience No Easy Solutions Global Cities, Natural Disasters, Development, and the Intellectual History of Resilience Thinking, 1960s to 1990s Sönke Kunkel ........................................................................... 129 Building Resilience through Commercial Relations The Formalization of Carwash Sites in Medellín Marcela López .......................................................................... 147 Enhancing Urban Resilience After the 1995 Kobe Earthquake Parks and Open Spaces as a Multi-Functional Resource Florian Hendrik Liedtke.................................................................. 167 Transportation as a Resilience Enhancing Tool Urban Dualism and the Latin American City Diego Silva Ardila ........................................................................ 181 IV) Epilogue Urban Resilience Has a History – And a Future Timothy Moss ........................................................................... 209 Author Bios ...........................................................................217 Acknowledgements This book began as a lively exchange of ideas at the biannual conference ofthe European Association for Urban History in Rome in September 2018. We want to thank the conference organizers for giving us the opportunity to explore themes related to Global Urban Resilience in such a congenial setting, and with so many interesting partners. Several of the presenters from that conference worked with us on this book, and we are grateful for their creative input over a period of more than 18 months. It was a pleasure to work with the contributors to this volume, who were open to critical input, and generous in sharing their own insights about editorial and conceptual questions. Thanks also to members of the research colloquium at the Center for Metropolitan Studies where we had a chance to discuss drafts of these chapters with our wonderful colleagues. We are grateful to the publishing team at transcript, especially Jakob Horstmann (who initiated the project with us) and Annika Linnemann (who helped us to bring it to print)! We want to extend a very special thank you to Dominik Essmann, who devoted an enormous amount of time and effort to formatting, proof-reading, and all sorts of other essential tasks. We also thank the Technische Universität Berlin for supporting Open Access Initiatives, which made it possible for us to share the book as widely as possible. Finally, and here we speak for many of the contributors, thanks to our families for their support, even at those times when we spent too many nights and weekends at our desks instead of with them. With family in mind, we dedicate this volume to Anika and Felix. I) Introduction Contesting Resilience Negotiating Shared Urban Futures Dorothee Brantz and Avi Sharma In the early 21st century, resilience has become the preferred policy constellation to address futures that are extremely uncertain but that are likely to be extreme. The Bloomberg and Rockefeller Foundations have resilient cities programming, as do the World Bank, Asia Development Bank, and dozens of other mega-organi- zations. Resilience plays an important role in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which have set global development targets for more than one hundred na- tions through 2030, and have on-the-ground impacts that will shape lives in all corners of the planet for a generation (Sharma 2015: 592).1 As Aditya Bahadur and others have argued, “The vision set out in the SDGs – for people, planet, prosperity and peace – will inevitably fail if shocks and stresses are not addressed […] A focus on strengthening resilience can protect development gains and ensure people have the resources and capacities to better reduce, prevent, anticipate, absorb and adapt to a range of shocks, stresses, risks and uncertainties” (Bahadur et al. 2015: 2).2 So- me argue that resilience is simply a trendy term, one that has gained currency in a variety of sectors because it is easy to use and extremely flexible. This may be true. But resilience as a development discourse and an urban practice directly impacts the lives of hundreds of millions of the world’s most vulnerable people: It is at the core of funding, development, and aid initiatives worth tens of billions of dollars. This alone – the fact that resilience does and will continue to shape lived realities across the planet – is a reason to think seriously about the concept, discourse, and practice. 1 Morethan1.3millionstakeholdersparticipatedinthedevelopmentofthe17‘universalprinci- ples’ that make up the SDGs. 2 ResilienceisacknowledgedbothexplicitlyandimplicitlyinarangeoftheproposedSDGtar- gets. Target 1.5 represents the core resilience target, as follows: “By 2030 build the resilience of the poor and those in vulnerable situations, and reduce their exposure and vulnerability to climate-related extreme events and other economic, social and environmental shocks and disasters.” 12 DorotheeBrantzandAviSharma Critical Claims about Resilience Practices Resilience has been applied to a range of issues and at a variety of scales – from global financial and ecological systems to human development – but cities havebe- come a particular object for resilience approaches (Chandler/Coaffee 2016). There are a host of reasons why this is the case. As population, commercial, religious, and political centers, cities have always served as amplifiers, and when disruptions do occur, they are felt with particular intensity in urban centers. When, for examp- le, a natural disaster impacts a city, the sheer density of the population and built environment regularly contributes to higher mortality rates; when financial crises occur, urban centers are impacted more visibly than other areas because they con- centrate financial and other capital institutions (Amin 2014: 308–9). At least since the Second World War, the vulnerability of urban systems has been noted by armed forces – military strategists, militias, terrorist groups – who have recognized that attacking cities can achieve a maximal return on investment (Coaffee et al. 2009: 4; 9-27). Cities are extremely vulnerable to a range of disruptions, but they are also (al- legedly) extremely resilient. In their seminal 2005 publication, urbanists Vale and Campanella note

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