Resilience, adaptation and adaptability

Abstract

The resilience of places in response to uncertain, volatile and rapid change has emerged as a focus of academic and policy attention. This paper aims to contribute to understanding and explaining the resilience of places. Drawing upon evolutionary Economic Geography, the concepts of adaptation and adaptability are developed in a framework based upon agents, mechanisms and sites. In contrast to equilibrium-based approaches, this approach can better capture the geographical diversity, variety and unevenness of resilience and address questions of what kind of resilience and for whom.