Abstract
This chapter explores the phenomenon of urban resilience and shows how climate urbanism has become a new planning logic in the global South. Drawing on experiences from Surat and Kochi in India, I illustrate the real and conscious political decisions that cities make to design and implement risk management priorities. Although resilience thinking offers visions of ‘bouncing back’ from and adapting to climate shocks while retaining economic prosperity, local rhetoric of and approaches to realizing resilience inevitably become enmeshed within the values and interests of political agents and forces that are constantly contesting the development trajectory of the city. For the global South, the rise of climate urbanism therefore raises questions about how its implementation can be complicated by established political coalitions, local development interests, and entrenched forms of socioeconomic exclusion.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anguelovski, I., & Carmin, J. (2011). Something borrowed, everything new: Innovation and institutionalization in urban climate governance. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 3(3), 169–175.
Anguelovski, I., Chu, E., & Carmin, J. (2014). Variations in approaches to urban climate adaptation: Experiences and experimentation from the global South. Global Environmental Change, 27, 156–167.
Anguelovski, I., Shi, L., Chu, E., Gallagher, D., Goh, K., Lamb, Z., et al. (2016). Equity impacts of urban land use planning for climate adaptation: Critical perspectives from the global north and south. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 36(3), 333–348.
Anguelovski, I., Connolly, J. J. T., Pearsall, H., Shokry, G., Checker, M., Maantay, J., et al. (2019). Opinion: Why green “climate gentrification” threatens poor and vulnerable populations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(52), 26139–26143.
Bahadur, A., & Tanner, T. (2014a). Transformational resilience thinking: Putting people, power and politics at the heart of urban climate resilience. Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 200–214.
Bahadur, A. V., & Tanner, T. (2014b). Policy climates and climate policies: Analysing the politics of building urban climate change resilience. Urban Climate, 7, 20–32.
Bahadur, A. V., & Thornton, H. (2015). Analysing urban resilience: A reality check for a fledgling canon. International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, 7(2), 196–212.
Bellinson, R., & Chu, E. (2019). Learning pathways and the governance of innovations in urban climate change resilience and adaptation. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 21(1), 76–89.
Béné, C., Wood, R. G., Newsham, A., & Davies, M. (2012). Resilience: New Utopia or New Tyranny? Reflection about the potentials and limits of the concept of resilience in relation to vulnerability reduction programmes. IDS Working Papers, 2012(405), 1–61.
Betsill, M. M., & Bulkeley, H. (2007). Looking back and thinking ahead: A decade of cities and climate change research. Local Environment, 12(5), 447–456.
Bhat, G. K., Karanth, A., Dashora, L., & Rajasekar, U. (2013). Addressing flooding in the city of Surat beyond its boundaries. Environment and Urbanization, 25(2), 429–441.
Birkmann, J., Welle, T., Solecki, W., Lwasa, S., & Garschagen, M. (2016). Boost resilience of small and mid-sized cities. Nature, 537(7622), 605–608.
Bohland, J., Davoudi, S., & Lawrence, J. L. (Eds.). (2019). The resilience machine. New York and London: Routledge.
Borie, M., Pelling, M., Ziervogel, G., & Hyams, K. (2019). Map** narratives of urban resilience in the global south. Global Environmental Change, 54, 203–213.
Brown, A. (2018). Visionaries, translators, and navigators: Facilitating institutions as critical enablers of urban climate change resilience. In S. Hughes, E. K. Chu, & S. G. Mason (Eds.), Climate change in cities: Innovations in multi-level governance (pp. 229–253). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
Brown, C., Shaker, R. R., & Das, R. (2018). A review of approaches for monitoring and evaluation of urban climate resilience initiatives. Environment, Development and Sustainability, 20(1), 23–40.
Bulkeley, H., & Castán Broto, V. (2013). Government by experiment? Global cities and the governing of climate change. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(3), 361–375.
Bulkeley, H., Castán Broto, V., & Edwards, G. A. S. (2015). An urban politics of climate change: Experimentation and the governing of socio-technical transitions. New York and London: Routledge.
Byskov, M. F., Hyams, K., Satyal, P., Anguelovski, I., Benjamin, L., Blackburn, S., et al. (2019). An agenda for ethics and justice in adaptation to climate change. Climate and Development, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2019.1700774
Carmin, J., Dodman, D., & Chu, E. (2013). Urban climate adaptation and leadership: From conceptual understanding to practical action (No. 2013/26). Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Castán Broto, V. (2017). Urban governance and the politics of climate change. World Development, 93, 1–15.
Chelleri, L., Waters, J. J., Olazabal, M., & Minucci, G. (2015). Resilience trade-offs: Addressing multiple scales and temporal aspects of urban resilience. Environment and Urbanization, 27(1), 181–198.
Chu, E. (2016a). The governance of climate change adaptation through urban policy experiments. Environmental Policy and Governance, 26(6), 439–451.
Chu, E. (2016b). The political economy of urban climate adaptation and development planning in Surat, India. Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 34(2), 281–298.
Chu, E. (2018). Transnational support for urban climate adaptation: Emerging forms of agency and dependency. Global Environmental Politics, 18(3), 25–46.
Chu, E., Anguelovski, I., & Carmin, J. (2016). Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South. Climate Policy, 16(3), 372–392.
Chu, E., & Michael, K. (2019). Recognition in urban climate justice: Marginality and exclusion of migrants in Indian cities. Environment and Urbanization, 31(1), 139–156.
Cote, M., & Nightingale, A. J. (2011). Resilience thinking meets social theory: Situating social change in socio-ecological systems (SES) research. Progress in Human Geography, 36(4), 475–489.
Cretney, R. (2014). Resilience for whom? Emerging critical geographies of socio-ecological resilience. Geography Compass, 8(9), 627–640.
Croese, S., Green, C., & Morgan, G. (2020). Localizing the sustainable development goals through the lens of urban resilience: Lessons and learnings from 100 resilient cities and Cape Town. Sustainability, 12(2), 550.
Eakin, H., Bojórquez-Tapia, L. A., Janssen, M. A., Georgescu, M., Manuel-Navarrete, D., Vivoni, E. R., et al. (2017). Opinion: Urban resilience efforts must consider social and political forces. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(2), 186–189.
Friend, R., & Moench, M. (2015). Rights to urban climate resilience: Moving beyond poverty and vulnerability. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 6(6), 23.
Godschalk, D. R. (2003). Urban hazard mitigation: Creating resilient cities. Natural Hazards Review, 4(3), 136–143.
Goh, K. (2020). Flows in formation: The global-urban networks of climate change adaptation. Urban Studies, 57(11), 2222–2240.
Gould, K. A., & Lewis, T. L. (2018). From green gentrification to resilience gentrification: An example from Brooklyn. City and Community, 17(1), 12–15.
Gunderson, L. (2010). Ecological and human community resilience in response to natural disasters. Ecology and Society, 15(2).
Harris, L. M., Chu, E. K., & Ziervogel, G. (2017). Negotiated resilience. Resilience, 6(3), 1–19.
Hodson, M., & Marvin, S. (2009). “Urban ecological security”: A new urban paradigm? International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33(1), 193–215.
Hughes, S., Chu, E. K., & Mason, S. G. (Eds.). (2018). Climate change in cities: Innovations in multi-level governance. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
IPCC. (2018). Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty[Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, H.-O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J.B.R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M.I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, and T. Waterfield (Eds.)]. Geneva, Switzerland: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
ISET. (2010). The shared learning dialogue: Building stakeholder capacity and engagement for climate resilience action. Boulder, CO: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition.
Joseph, J. (2013). Resilience as embedded neoliberalism: A governmentality approach. Resilience, 1(1), 38–52.
Keenan, J. M., Hill, T., & Gumber, A. (2018). Climate gentrification: From theory to empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Environmental Research Letters, 13(5).
Long, J., & Rice, J. L. (2019). From sustainable urbanism to climate urbanism. Urban Studies, 56(5), 992–1008.
MacKinnon, D., & Derickson, K. D. (2013). From resilience to resourcefulness. Progress in Human Geography, 37(2), 253–270.
Mathew, S., Trück, S., & Henderson-Sellers, A. (2012). Kochi, India case study of climate adaptation to floods: Ranking local government investment options. Global Environmental Change, 22(1), 308–319.
Matin, N., Forrester, J., & Ensor, J. (2018). What is equitable resilience? World Development, 109, 197–205.
McCann, E. (2011). Urban policy mobilities and global circuits of knowledge: Toward a research agenda. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101(1), 107–130.
McEvoy, D., Fünfgeld, H., & Bosomworth, K. (2013). Resilience and climate change adaptation: The importance of framing. Planning Practice and Research, 28(3), 280–293.
Meerow, S., & Newell, J. P. (2019). Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why? Urban Geography, 40(3), 309–329.
Meerow, S., Pajouhesh, P., & Miller, T. R. (2019). Social equity in urban resilience planning. Local Environment, 24(9), 793–808.
Meerow, S., & Stults, M. (2016). Comparing conceptualizations of urban climate resilience in theory and practice. Sustainability, 8(7), 701.
Moench, M., Tyler, S., & Lage, J. (Eds.). (2011). Catalyzing urban climate resilience: Applying resilience concepts to planning practice in the ACCCRN program 2009–2011. Boulder, CO: Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET).
Patterson, J. J., & Huitema, D. (2019). Institutional innovation in urban governance: The case of climate change adaptation. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 62(3), 374–398.
Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2015). Fast policy: Experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism. Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press.
Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. Antipode, 34(3), 380–404.
Pizzo, B. (2015). Problematizing resilience: Implications for planning theory and practice. Cities, 43, 133–140.
Ranganathan, M., & Bratman, E. (2019). From urban resilience to abolitionist climate justice in Washington, DC. Antipode, (early view). https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12555.
Rice, J. L., Cohen, D. A., Long, J., & Jurjevich, J. R. (2020). Contradictions of the climate-friendly city: New perspectives on eco-gentrification and housing justice. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 44(1), 145–165.
Sadi, M. A. (2013). The implementation process of nationalization of workforce in Saudi Arabian private sector: A review of “Nitaqat Scheme.”. American Journal of Business and Management, 2(1), 37.
Sharma, D., Singh, R., & Singh, R. (2014). Building urban climate resilience: Learning from the ACCCRN experience in India. International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development, 6(2), 133–153.
Shi, L., Chu, E., Anguelovski, I., Aylett, A., Debats, J., Goh, K., et al. (2016). Roadmap towards justice in urban climate adaptation research. Nature Climate Change, 6(2), 131–137.
Tanner, T., Zaman, R. U., Acharya, S., Gogoi, E., & Bahadur, A. (2019). Influencing resilience: The role of policy entrepreneurs in mainstreaming climate adaptation. Disasters, 43(S3), S388–S411.
Vale, L. J. (2014). The politics of resilient cities: Whose resilience and whose city? Building Research and Information, 42(2), 191–201.
Weichselgartner, J., & Kelman, I. (2015). Geographies of resilience: Challenges and opportunities of a descriptive concept. Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), 249–267.
Zachariah, K. C., Mathew, E. T., & Rajan, S. I. (2001). Social, economic and demographic consequences of migration on Kerala. International Migration, 39(2), 43–71.
Ziervogel, G., Pelling, M., Cartwright, A., Chu, E., Deshpande, T., Harris, L., et al. (2017). Inserting rights and justice into urban resilience: A focus on everyday risk. Environment and Urbanization, 29(1), 123–138.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chu, E. (2020). Urban Resilience and the Politics of Development. In: Castán Broto, V., Robin, E., While, A. (eds) Climate Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53386-1_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53386-1_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-53385-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-53386-1
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)