BUILDINGS DON’T BOUNCE The Design Paradox of Urban Resilience

Abstract

There is an unresolved paradox for the built environment disciplines in urban sustainability and resilience. By definition, a sustainable city must be resilient and vice versa. We outline the ramifications for designing vibrant urbanism in the 21st century by briefly reviewing some of the contradictions in current definitions and debate about resilience in the literature. We argue a conceptual ground-clearing exercise is necessary to reposition the design of buildings and places at the center of a more rigorous theoretical framework, which better unites issues of urban resilience and sustainability because cities are by and for people with a cultural and social dimension that is rooted in the physical object (Jacobs, 1961; Hillier, 1996). We conclude that if we want to design and plan resilient, sustainable cities in the future, then we need to look to some of the oldest, continuallyinhabited cities in the world to better understand how and why they have endured as dynamic urban systems over a thousand years or longer, where one common denominator appears to be humanistic design