BC3. Basque centre for climate change – Klima aldaketa ikergai

Seminar / Mintegia / Seminario

City Resilience: just do it?

Lecturer:
Lorenzo Chelleri, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Gran Sasso Science Institute – Urban Research Unit, L’Aquila, IT

Abstract:

In line with the recent threats and challenges framed around climate change adaptation and mitigation, the concept of resilience applied to cities navigated through a first successful wave of policy discourses and initiatives. However, after crashing against a recent but increasing number of critics, from different disciplines, a second wave is trying to re-establish the reliability of resilience by proposing a critical mass of city resilience assessment tools. These are providing indicators and weights for a more cautionary and effective way of building resilient cities. This talk speculates around the application of those metrics, explaining through different case studies (Barcelona, on critical infrastructures and L’Aquila, on post-disaster reconstruction governance) how integrated resilience metrics are often biased from, since based on, others concepts’ indicators, showing that i) resilience is still, after its first wave of metaphorical meanings success, an overall umbrella for different city policies and ii) resilience principles (mostly rooted in social, ecological sciences and engineering) still lack consistency for being operationalized in urban systems.

Short BIO

Lorenzo is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at GSSI, Urban Research Unit. He is a multidisciplinary researcher, PhD (2012) in urban geography from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, European MSc in environmental planning and policy and Bachelor in urban planning. His researches focus around the interplay between urban sustainability and resilience, with particular emphasis on the cross scales and multiple trade-offs embedded within long term urban transitions. Lorenzo is founder member and chair of the Urban Resilience Research Network (URNet), has worked for the European Environment Agency (ETC-TE, 2007) and been involved in different national and European projects addressing Climate and Communities Resilience.

If you are interested in attending the Seminar, please sen us an email to events@bc3research.org 

14^th June, 12:00-13:00 BC3 offices 

* The Seminar will be in English. / Mintegia ingelesez burutuko da. / El seminario se realizará en inglés.