ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

From complex adaptive systems to anti-fragility and social innovation: The notion of resilience in metropolitn spatial planning

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral SS 06 | Metropolitan Resilience: Challenges, Fields of Action and Answers

Speakers

Mr Johannes Suitner (TU Wien, Institute of Spatial Planning, Research Unit Urban and Regional Research)Ms Valeria Fedeli (Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies)

Description

In the current polycrisis context, resilience has taken a prominent spot as a prime objective on the political agenda. In spatial planning, the concept has also received increased attention in the past two decades as a planning rationale for designing “future-fit” spatial structures and planning procedures. In that regard, the metropolitan region is particularly cited as a promising scale for ensuring resilient spatial development and dealing with the challenges of social-ecological transformation.
This paper presents the conceptual understanding of resilience in the context of metropolitan regions as currently debated in the ARL International Working Group “Resilient Metropolitan Regions”. We shortly introduce the concept’s social-ecological origins and recent differentiations in planning discourse to distill the five resilience principles of robustness, adaptability, learning, innovation, and governability as a general rationale for addressing and assessing substantial and procedural aspects of metropolitan resilience.
We then explore the concept’s evolution towards anti-fragility, that is, the ability to take advantage of uncertainties and disruptions, turning vulnerability into opportunity. In particular, we illustrate (i) how modern crises can be interpreted as opportunities to reorganize and improve existing structures, (ii) why a territorial perspective is necessary to assess resilience and how it can foster anti-fragility, and (iii) why a perspective on (planning) institutions matters particularly to ensure resilience.
To conclude, we discuss some key ambivalences that these rationales imply on the substantial and procedural level of metropolitan planning: On the substantial level, we emphasize the ambivalence between redundant and sustainable infrastructure systems, decentralization and polycentricity. On the procedural level, we discuss the ambivalence of legitimacy vs. agility/flexibility of (planning) institutions and what this implies for often-heralded social and governance innovations in planning.