Nepal and the “urban resilience utopia”

Abstract

The normative concept of a resilient city is afflicted by the technocratic thinking that a desired—hence resilient—state of an urban area might be a) explicitly identifiable and b) uncertainties around it are controllable. Western principles of projectable future(s) and orderly reality, as well as (pre-) defined cause and effect chains, contribute to this overestimation. Based on the “vulnerable” status quo, resilience measures are suggested which often focus on one sector of the urban multi-cosmos and are trying to fix symptoms of said vulnerable state. This is particularly true for cities and urban areas in the global south. Oversimplified implementation strategies on “how to become resilient” fall short on the complexity of the urban risk landscape and leave those at risk in limbo. This ‘Urban Resilience Utopia’ poses a threat to the core of the resilience agenda as a transformative power. This chapter reaches out to the social resilience “capacities” concept and translates it into guiding questions for planning DRR development interventions. Key characteristics of the adaptive governance concept are used to evaluate the practicability of those questions using examples from Nepal. This chapter might be considered a plea for a thorough “rewind” of expectations once we try to practically operationalize resilience and for a critical self-assessment and thoroughgoing process of developing a common language among those involved in building resilience.