ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the tension between risk and safety in the contemporary city, and the bridging concept of urban resilience as key to urban sustainability and justice. The concept of resilience offers a promising means of finding a way through the urban demand for both risk and safety. The value and sense of approaching resilience as a normative process, rather than a predetermined state of "future-proofing," are contested by many. Key to the contemporary celebration of the city is the sense of rarefied order and security that parts of the place made city offer. A fundamental role of the modern nation state is to ensure people's bodily security and security of their property, regardless of their position or wealth. The pragmatic scene of struggle is the public domain in which dynamic arguments are offered and counter-offered, inquiries into the common social good are pursued and verbally attacked in public, and new tests and compromises developed.
