Urban Resilience and Spatial Economics

Abstract

The concept of resilience, which was first introduced during the 1970s in the field of ecology, has since been used and analysed in many different disciplinary fields. Even though the resilience concept is not a new one, it still attracts attention in various scholarly domains and disciplines, such as economics, or sociology, in order to understand the process of anticipating, adapting and recovering in the face of major threats or shocks. The concept itself, however, is not easy to operationalise in practice. The existence of various types of definitions and interpretations from different fields and studies leads to a very complex analysis framework for measuring and analysing the resilience concept. Therefore, it is crucial to interpret the concept in all its dimensions, determinants and levels within a new and broader framework for both the natural and social sciences. In this chapter, we look at the urban resilience concept from a multidimensional perspective, in order to define and measure it in an appropriate operational way within an urban context. The aim of this chapter is thus to present a new framework for urban resilience with an additional dimension which is called ‘spatiality’, by taking into account the spatial advantages and disadvantages of existing definitions of urban resilience in the literature. The spatiality dimension includes the spatial characteristics of urban areas, such as urban morphology, urban size, transport network patterns and accessibility. This study is a novel attempt to map out the spatial characteristics of urban areas in the context of urban resilience with emphasis on spatial units, spatial heterogeneity and spatial correlation issues.