Resilience and adaptation are increasingly central to urban design, especially in a time of climate crises, pandemics, and rapid socio-economic shifts. Though conceptually distinct, these two ideas are tightly interconnected. Both speak to how urban systems respond to shocks and stressors—whether sudden, like an earthquake, or gradual, like gentrification or climate change. As Zolli and Healey (2012) put it, resilience is “the ability of a system, firm, or person to maintain its core purpose and integrity in the face of dramatically changed circumstances.” This definition reveals its multidisciplinary roots, bridging ecology, sociology, planning, and beyond.
In practice, resilience is often treated as a one-size-fits-all response to crisis, regardless of whether the triggering events are abrupt or slow-moving. This can lead to conceptual ambiguities. What does resilience look like after a flood versus after years of social fragmentation? How do different communities, or even different neighbourhoods within the same city, respond to the same event? These are questions that urban design must confront if it is to effectively support more resilient futures.
An evolutionary perspective on resilience (Bohland et al., 2019) moves us away from the idea of a single “ideal” equilibrium. Instead, cities can and do operate within multiple possible states. The task of design is not to restore some static past but to ask: Which equilibrium are we designing for? A cultural or economic crisis may call for very different strategies than a natural disaster. The inherent flexibility of resilience makes it useful—but also difficult to pin down, as Vale and Campanella (2005) note. It’s no surprise that most research has gravitated toward environmental risks, especially in the wake of Covid-19.
Resilience has been widely adopted across disciplines: ecologists study how ecosystems bounce back after shocks; psychologists examine how individuals cope with trauma; IT experts assess how networks survive failures. In cities, it becomes about anticipating risks—natural or human-made—and implementing proactive solutions to reduce vulnerability in both public and private spaces. But preventive resilience requires upfront investment, political will, and a clear understanding of which populations are most at risk.
Critically, resilience is also about equity. Cities are not uniform, and neither is risk. Informal settlements and marginalised neighbourhoods often face compounded vulnerabilities: lack of infrastructure, social exclusion, limited access to services. As the Covid-19 crisis showed, some communities are not only more exposed to risk—they also have fewer resources to recover.
This makes uncertainty (De Roo et al., 2020) a defining feature of resilient urban planning. We rarely know the precise form that the next crisis will take. That’s why cities must plan with uncertainty, rather than against it. Incorporating flexible, cross-scalar planning tools and fostering cooperation across institutions are key steps. So too is recognising and responding to social diversity, which shapes how different communities experience and respond to risk.
Here, adaptation enters the conversation. If resilience is about absorbing shocks and maintaining integrity, adaptation is about change: shifting strategies, transforming spaces, and navigating complexity. Urban planning must become more agile, moving beyond fixed blueprints to embrace iterative, responsive processes. This means adopting both ex-ante(before-the-fact) and ex-post (after-the-fact) tools to learn and adjust along the way.
Adaptive planning is especially important for addressing climate-related risks, which intersect with housing, mobility, health, and identity. Concepts like sustainable urban form—compact, dense, mixed-use, accessible, and green—are not only about efficiency but also about enabling cities to adjust to evolving conditions (Jabareen, 2013). Here, public space plays a critical role. Parks, squares, and streets are more than circulation infrastructure: they’re arenas where people, institutions, resources, and processes interact.
Designing for adaptivity also requires a shift in how we think about systems. Traditional planning often assumes a stable world—one where decisions can be made based on current data and straightforward projections. But real-world systems are dynamic. Outcomes rarely match intentions. A road designed to relieve traffic may encourage more driving. A housing project may spark displacement. Adaptive planning recognises this by designing with complexity, not against it.
This is where new concepts like multi-resilience and multi-adaptation come into play (Sepe, 2020). Multi-resilience refers to a system’s ability to respond to multiple, overlapping risks, taking into account the specific qualities of place and inclusive participation. Multi-adaptation builds on this, focusing on how places can evolve into new equilibria that incorporate different actors, territorial specificities, and risk typologies. Together, these frameworks call for urban design that is both locally grounded and systemically aware.
Urban regeneration must embrace this integrated, adaptive mindset. It’s not just about fixing degraded areas—it’s about addressing environmental, social and economic dimensions together. Sustainability here isn’t a checkbox but a living principle that must be embedded into policy, design, and community engagement.
Ultimately, designing for resilience and adaptation means accepting that uncertainty is not an exception—it’s the new normal. Rather than resisting change, urban design must work with it, creating places that can bend without breaking, adapt without losing identity, and thrive through transformation.
Bohland J. R., Davoudi S., Lawrence J. L., (eds) (2019). The resilience machine. Routledge, New York
De Roo G., Yamu C., & Zuidema C. (2020). Handbook on Planning and Complexity. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK
Jabareen Y. (2013). Planning the resilient city: Concepts and strategies for coping with climate change and environmental risk. Cities, 31, 220-229.
Vale L.J., & Campanella T.J. (2005). The resilient city: how modern cities recover from disaster. Oxford Scholarship Online
Zolli A., Healey A. M. (2012). Resilience. Why things bounce back. The Free Press, New York
