Introduction

This book aims to define the position of architecture in urban resilience discourse, and more significantly, describe how architecture and urban practices can make a transformative contribution. In this introductory chapter we trace the emergence of the concept of resilience in ecology and its reception in urban development and the field of architecture to set out the importance of connecting the climate imperatives for resilience with social justice and community imperatives. The focus of this book is concerned with resilience at the ‘human scale’, the lived scale of buildings, neighbourhoods and everyday life. The focus on ‘the local’ does not mean ‘localising’ structural problems, but is considered as one location from which to challenge and transform them. Taking resilience as a transformative concept, this book asks where and what architecture might contribute.

In providing such an introduction, the volume is structured through a series of ‘dialogues’ which aim to cluster chapters together in ways that put different views in tension, to open up difference and discussion, rather than lining up different views positivistically. As the question of how to make neighbourhoods and urban localities resilient is not specific to any one field, each ‘dialogue’ connects architecture to a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. The ‘dialogues’ cover questions of: (I) narratives of resilience, (II) community resilience and the right to housing, (III) new pedagogies of resilience, (IV) challenging climate denial, (V) resilience ethics and interdependence and (VI) scales of resilience concerning the city, the region and globalisation. Accompanying the authored chapters, the book includes practice-based interventions, in the form of interviews, to give space to otherwise unarticulated and valuable knowledge from practice.