Recent global trends have seen a steady increase in both the levels of urbanisation and forced displacement worldwide. This nexus of challenges is evident in the Great Lakes region of sub-Saharan Africa, where protracted conflicts have produced large populations of refugees, in tandem with the rapid growth of cities such as Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. For an urban municipality, the presence of a burgeoning urban refugee population in Dar es Salaam presents a number of difficulties. As a city with 5.6% annual growth, Tanzania’s primary city is already struggling to contend with migration from rural areas, poor infrastructure, the effects of climate change and widespread informality. To successfully integrate refugees into a host community with whom they will have to complete with for employment and access to basic services requires the municipality to support the refugees’ own resilience strategies, and facilitate wider community resilience through urban institutions. This paper will examine what types of resilience strategies have emerged, both at an individual and institutional level in Dar es Salaam, as a consequence of the urbanisation-displacement nexus. Using Ager and Strang’s integration framework, the limitations and opportunities inherent to creating a more inclusive space in the city will be considered.

Every city represents a storehouse of memories. At the same time today’s cities are dynamic systems characterized by constant change. Technical and architectural structures of different scales that are approaching the end of their utilization cycles must be identified and reviewed. My paper will propose to extend the term resilience as the early detection of spatial or functional disturbances within the cities infrastructure followed by a strategy for maintaining the state or use of the building or structure. Using the example of our architectural practice for a conversion of a former thermal power station in Munich, I will present how a revision of the conventional assessment strategy resulted in a transformation of an obsolete piece of technical infrastructure again into a dynamic architectural and social system. Since then we have been searching for methods to identify similar potential in obsolete pieces of infrastructure and to react on disruptions in the urban environment. In the end architects – using their expertise – could turn into early detectors to identify these disruptions and by that give new meaning to the whole profession that has reached a turning point in constantly creating the “new” - while often wasting resources, materials and labour force. Instead of reacting on questions of fashion, style and floor area, architects may convince their clients to reshape the cities of tomorrow by puncturing the urban environment where its needed. That is the new “new”: parallel to the usual planning from scratch on whiteboards we must take into account the potential of the cities obsolete infrastructure and transform it into useful architecture to avoid areas of decay. For this is how resilience becomes possible: As the ability of a system to react to disruptions, to use them to renew itself, without changing its core.

Events related to water systems such as flooding are often evident consequences of inadequate land use and changes in climate that are altering the natural water cycle and are already compromising human health and amenity for urban dwellers. Hereby, transitions to more sustainable ways of water management have been recognized as urgent shifts to achieve necessary resilience in cities. Current discussions point out that approaches that integrate water management into urban development and urban design such as Water sensitive urban design (WSUD) are powerful strategies to support the sustainability of cities. They have the potential to ensure water resilience and also to improve quality of life in urban areas. Due to insufficient planning practices and policies to protect permeable areas and natural resources, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam (HCMC) becomes one of the ten top cities worldwide with higher risks for population and infrastructure over flooding events (World bank, 2010). Great part of the city suffers frequent flooding events and severe disruption on built infrastructure and people’s wellbeing (Storch et.al. 2002). It shows the urgency in developing integrated planning strategies and policies that that are robust enough to protect the city against flooding risks and improve quality of life in urban areas. The central question that this research aims to investigate is in how far more integrative approaches in water management have the potential to address uncertainty regarding flood risks in HCMC while at the same time, improve quality of life in the urban area. This study is applied to a housing settlement in HCMC and evaluates morphological data by qualitative methods combined with quantitative assessments of flood extends. The expected outcome is to orient the city to adopt more integrative planning practices and policy recommendation for land use control based on water sensitive urban design (WSUD) indicators.

This study emphasizes the significance of urban green spaces in urban planning and suggests a foundational framework for conceptualizing their social-ecological resilience through the studied case, the Frankfurt Rhine-Main region. Considering the increased frequency and severity of main urban hazards—namely flood, drought, and heat wave—the role of urban green spaces in adapting the outcomes of a changing climate becomes increasingly important. At the same time, considering the need to densify the urban settings due to increasing housing demand, densification of inner-city areas is often employed as a strategy against urban sprawl. This competition for spatial reserves brings about an urban land-use conflict in many growing metropolitan regions in the world. The Frankfurt Rhine-Main region, with its peaking rates of housing demand and increased intensity of climate-related urban hazards, is no exception to this trend. Although urban resilience can be a very useful concept in understanding global urban phenomena, due to its eclectic nature, scientific works produced in this field usually face the risk of either oversimplification or over-complication. This paper observes urban green spaces as urban social-ecological systems and from the standpoint of social-ecological resilience, it brings together the concepts of (i) land-use conflict regarding the use of spatial reserves either for climate adaptation or urban growth and (ii) supportive or restrictive nature of the urban governance. The suggested conceptual framework lays a context-specific foundation to eventually enable a comprehensive analysis of the current situation (base case) and to inform future interventions (alternative cases).

The proposed article explores the contribution of public places for building urban resilience in Volos (Greece) and investigates the role of digital tools to overcome challenges of urban resilience. This article provides reviews of different approaches to urban resilience and its integration with sustainability targets, where urban resilience is described as a sustainable process, providing capacities for positive change and ability to move forward and improve in response to stresses. The article argues that public places can be considered as useful tools for risk mitigation, emergency response, recovery and adaptation if they have social, economic and environmental capacities. Strengthening social capacity of public spaces and building place capital through inclusive practices contribute to their resilience to face natural disasters and social risks. During an emergency time, public spaces are mainly used as places for shelter, gathering and distribution of services, goods and information. In cases of social crises public spaces shape the relationship between local community and affected social groups.

This article investigates risk mitigation and emergency response practices in urban environment in Volos, identifies physical and social resilience credentials of its public places, and analyses the related institutional framework for disaster prevention and management. It argues that there are deficiencies in disaster management in Volos, and low capacity to adapt to different anticipated and unexpected risks. Consequently, it proposes strategies to increase the adaptive capacity of public spaces in Volos and argues that digital inclusion can reinforce their resilience and facilitate coordination, management, implementation and disseminating of existing risk mitigation and emergency framework (Xenokratis Plan). Within this framework, the study investigates the potential of Blockchain technologies to provide the resilient alternative to the standard IT systems, facilitate a decentralized and more reliable infrastructure of the city and autonomous interactions for public participation, decentralized governance, controlled by local communities.