Urban resilience discourse analysis : towards a multi-2 level approach to cities 3

This study aims to understand the current state of research in urban resilience and to open 13 a discussion about multi-level perspectives for this concept. Starting with the history of the concept 14 of resilience, we identify three main stages in resilience concept’s evolution: conceptualization, 15 contextualization and operationalization. Confusion occurs between sustainability and resilience, 16 therefore we clearly separate these two concepts by creating conceptual maps. Such maps also 17 underline the specificities of urban and regional resilience discourses. We illustrate that urban 18 resilience research, operating within intra-urban processes, is oriented towards natural disasters, 19 while regional resilience research, operating mostly within inter-urban processes, is oriented 20 towards economic shocks. We show that these two approaches to resilience – urban and regional – 21 are complementary, and we propose to integrate them into a multi-level perspective. By combining 22 these two discourses, we propose a multi-level approach to urban resilience that takes into account 23 both top-down and bottom-up resistance processes. In the discussion section, we propose to take 24 the panarchy perspective as a theoretical framework for multi-level urban resilience, that explains 25 the interactions between different levels through adaptive cycles, relationships between which can 26 help to explain urban resilience. 27


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Today the concept of urban resilience has a growing interest among both scholars and 32 practitioners. One of the explanations of this popularity can be the fact that the notion of resilience

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However, the notion appears very polysemic and its measures and operationalization remain 39 unclear, especially when resilience is applied for the analyses of socio-political, or socio-ecological 40 systems, such as cities [2]. Besides this, it is unclear whether "resilience" is an inner property of a 41 system, or it must be understood as an interaction between a system and its context [3]. When Martin

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The paper builds the multi-level perspective in four steps: in the first section, we revisit the 72 historical perspective of the resilience concept and identify several stages of its evolution in time, 73 namely conceptualization, contextualization and operationalization (1). Having noticed a confusion 74 between the term resilience and sustainability in the literature, we compared these two concepts and 75 highlight the common and different features in order to avoid further confusion (2). Then, regarding 76 urban resilience, as a consequence of the contextualization stage, we conduct a systematic literature 77 review of its discourse by creating conceptual maps: both for urban and regional resilience 78 discourses, in order to illustrate differences between them, but also their complementary character 79 (3). In the last section, we propose a multi-level perspective that integrates both urban and regional 80 resilience perspectives and includes internal and external processes to cities. Furthermore, in this  87 the two parameters -ability to absorb and maintaining -remained unchanged [8][9][10][11]. In the papers 88 of that time, the authors conceptualized the notion of resilience based on the distinction between 89 stability and resilience. Stability is the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium state after a 90 temporary disturbance: the more rapidly it returns and the less it fluctuates, the more stable it would 91 be [12]. Resilience then qualifies the ability to absorb shocks and maintain the same type of 92 relationships between different entities within the system.

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A next stage began with the collaboration between ecologists and economists [13]. Operating an 106 enormous variation of definitions of resilience mainly depending on the context of application, they 107 tried to keep a kind of universal definition of resilience. Levin et al. [13] expanded the application of 108 resilience and argued that resilience is a "property of any complex, non-linear systems, whether ecological 109 or socioeconomic, do not lend themselves to management protocols based on assumptions of linear, globally 110 stable, single equilibrium systems" [citation from [14] p. 259]. At the same time, the problem of 111 conceptualization still exists, for example, Hanley [15] notices that the concept of resilience is highly 112 suggestive and suffers from imprecision of definition and conceptualization, which in turn weakens 113 its value as an analytical or explanatory tool. Another novelty of the contextualization stage of 114 resilience was the introduction of the role of institutions in resilience discourse [16,17]. It was justified 115 as an essential link between social and ecological resilience and defined in a broad sense to include 116 routines, together with rules and norms that govern society, as well as the more usual notion of 117 formal institutions with memberships, constituencies and stakeholders. The question of institutions 118 is essential for urban resilience, first of all, because of non-adaptability of institutions to the whole 119 city system: most cities are spread between numerous municipalities, where institutional power is 120 distributed and rarely coordinated. Another question that was raised at that time, concerned the 121 relationship between resilience and sustainability [18][19][20][21]

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At this stage, the delineation of several resilience notions took place. On the one hand, resilience 135 of water, energy or food supply systems can be aggregated into a layer-oriented resilience discourse, 136 because they all consider a certain layer on a given territory and that's why operationalization can be 137 extended from one layer to another with certain limitations (We consider a layer as a network system 138 on a given territory, e.g. water supply system or metro system). On the other hand, urban (meso level) 139 and community (micro level) resilience can also be combined into one discourse, because they 140 consider similar types of shocks (local bottom-up) and analyze them on the micro to the meso levels 141 [30]. Besides, regional resilience constitutes its own discourse, very different from all the previous 142 ones with a very strong domination of the economic context and with top-down shocks that come 143 from macro level (national and international). Economists and economic geographers decompose 4 of 18 resilience into certain stages, such as vulnerability, resistance, robustness and recoverability [31], or 145 resistance, rebound and recuperation [29]. There is an important distinction between an economic 146 approach to resilience and a complex system perspective: the economists emphasize resilience as a 147 process that can be divided into several stages, while the complex system approach underlines 148 resilience as a property of complex adaptive systems. Is it a strong dichotomy or can these approaches 149 be integrated into one model? If yes, which theoretical framework should be used for this

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With this approach we were able to better determine common points and differences between 181 resilience and sustainability (2.1), and to clarify the urban resilience discourse (2.2) and the regional 182 resilience approach (2.3).

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With the methodology previously described, the below graph was created and can support 194 reflections on the conceptual building of both concepts (Fig.1). The main purpose of this graph is to 195 visualize the relationship between resilience and sustainability and to select the elements that can be The resulting graph underlines that only four terms appear linked to both resilience and

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Can we apply the same relationship between these two terms to complex systems such as cities?

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In the literature about social-ecological systems (SES) (city is often considered as such system) most 218 of the studies are conceptual and analyze the differences and similarities between sustainability and

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In fact, even being very tightly linked, these two concepts have also notable differences:

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resilience is linked to such terms as "evolution", "complexity", "process" and "change" that imply 225 the process of adaptation as a key characteristic of resilience. In contrast, sustainability is linked to 226 terms such as "policies", "decision-making", "institutions" and "climate change" -in other words, it

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Adaptation addresses a potential threat and associated vulnerability, and adjusts the system as a 235 response to that threat [35]. Transformation, by contrast, implies a more pervasive and radical 236 reorganization of the social-ecological system: it is a fundamental alteration of a system once the shared attitudes [35]. Simply put, we can agree with Redman [35], who argued that sustainability 244 prioritizes outcomes, and resilience prioritizes process (but is not equal to it!). The multi-scale 245 dynamics of these processes and outcomes is a central part of the panarchy perspective [60] that we 246 propose to use as a theoretical framework to address urban resilience in a multi-level perspective.

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It is noteworthy, that Holling introduced the notion of resilience into ecological discourse, and 248 as a continuum 40 years after, he proposed a panarchy perspective to explain resilience of human 249 and natural systems, where the key element is interactions between different adaptive cycles.

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According to panarchy [60], an adaptive cycle operates within three dimensions: potential (inherent 251 potential of a system that is available for change), connectedness (measure of flexibility or rigidity) 252 and resilience, where resilience is equal to adaptive capacity and opposite to vulnerability. The

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In the resilience cluster (in purple in Figure 1) there is a subgraph linked to "system approach".   To construct an urban resilience discourse, we used the same 4 step method as before. We terms out of 125 in total are linked in one way or another to ecology (terms such as "natural disaster", 303 ecosystem services", urban climate resilience" etc.). For comparison, only 9 terms represent the social 304 domain of urban resilience (terms such as "social resilience", "social support", "social vulnerability" 305 etc.) and 3 belong to the economic domain, namely, "economy", "economic recessions" and 306 "economic growth". Why is there such a disbalance in urban resilience research between these three 307 main dimensions of the classical understanding of resilience? Why do scholars often equalize terms 308 "community resilience" and "urban resilience"? Why don't urban resilience scholars ever talk about 309 city's resilience to economic shocks? 310 311 Figure 2. Co-occurrences of terms in the abstracts of papers with "Urban resilience" in their title

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The dominating position of ecological topics in urban resilience can be clearly seen on the Figure   313 2: there are such separate terms as "urban climate resilience", "flood resilience", "urban disaster resilience", 314 "urban energy resilience", "ecosystem resilience", "community resilience". Moreover, terms from ecology 315 appear in most of the clusters. Even though these terms belong to different clusters, due to the specific 316 problems they address, they are always considered in an urban or community context. Social 317 resilience in this graph is also very often linked to ecology, especially when it concerns consequences 318 of natural disasters for cities and communities [62][63][64].

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In the graph there are terms such as "economic growth" that are directly linked to urban resilience, 320 or such as "economic recessions" that are in separate clusters. According to most of the papers in this

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On the way to construct a multi-level approach to urban resilience, we paid special attention to 332 certain terms linking "urban resilience" and "cities".

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All of this illustrates the main assumption of the urban resilience discourse: most scholars and 365 practitioners consider a city as an isolated entity that create resilience based on the inner processes in 366 cities, neglecting the top down processes that shape urban resilience from outside of a city, namely 367 from the level of systems of cities. We can call it a "lock-in" in research: when the concept is used 368 only partially and in one direction. If we consider the embeddedness of a city into another system, 369 not necessarily into systems of cities, but into regional systems, for example, the dominating approach 370 in resilience discourse will probably change? In doing so, we conducted a third literature review on "regional resilience" in the title and 373 constructed a corpus of literature that includes 174 papers from 1986 to 2018. Using a similar 374 methodology, we created a graph that visualizes terms appearing in these papers (Fig.3). 375 376 Figure 3. Co-occurrences of terms in the abstracts of papers with "Regional resilience" in the title 377 According to figure 3, the dominating topic in the regional resilience discourse is economy: in 378 every cluster, there are words linked to an economic context. As shocks on a regional scale, scholars 379 mostly perceive economic crises and recession. At the same time, we can find terms such as "disaster 380 resilience", "climate change" or "ecological resilience" which, nevertheless, don't create their own clusters 381 (for example, unlike "regional resilience" and "regional economic resilience") and are linked to terms such 382 as "cities" and "community resilience". And again, we do not exclude that regional resilience does not 383 concern natural disasters at all [85], but we highlight that it is not a dominant topic in this discourse 384 contrary to urban resilience research.

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As a measure of regional economic resilience most of the authors use indicators such as 386 employment [86-88], employment growth rate [87,89] or per capita GDP [90]. However, the most 387 common indicator in regional economic resilience analyses is regional employment, because the 388 behavior of the labor market is considered to be one of the main sources of economic resilience on 389 the regional level [86,87]. But one may wonder what is the meaning of a regional level? Explaining 390 why resilience analyses should be concentrated on a regional level, Christopherson argues that

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In order to understand this separation of topics between urban and regional resilience we need 394 to understand the meaning of "regional" and how scholars distinguish one region from another. The

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In general, in regional resilience research, a city is considered to be embedded into another 403 system (region), even though the effects of this system on city resilience are not investigated.

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Moreover, some scholars note that a region itself, as an economic system, is connected to economic 405 changes at global and national levels [93,94] and each region has its own relative position in national 406 and global markets [95], which means its embeddedness into the processes on a macro level. Here is 407 the fundamental difference between urban and regional resilience research: regional resilience 408 scholars consider a region as an open system, interacting with other systems within national or global 409 scales, and therefore, they take into consideration top down processes that are crucial for economic 410 analyses, which became the main instrument for regional resilience research. Contrary to it, most 411 urban resilience scholars consider a city as an isolated entity and, therefore, analyze only internal 412 shocks that have an origin inside a city and unfold there. Some of them apply a system approach to 413 a city, but they perceive a city only as a system itself, but not as an embedded system into another

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We have seen that resilience, during its conceptual formation, has already been applied to a very 419 wide range of contexts. Due to its multidisciplinary nature, it does not constitute one discourse, 420 rather, depending on the object and level of analyses, we observe a decomposition of the resilience 421 concept into many quite different, but still linked discourses with their own dominating paradigms.

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It has been shown that depending on the approach, resilience can be understood either as a process 423 or as a system's property. However, we wonder if we take a multi-level perspective, would it be 424 possible to consider resilience as a process on one level and as a system property on another?

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Analyzing the urban resilience discourse, we have shown that some authors raise the question of a 426 multi-level perspective to cities. For example, Chirisa & Banbauko [97] and Asprone & Manfredi [54] 427 apply a systems approach to cities and argue that contemporary cities are complex systems with 428 networks of composite relationships among their internal components and inter-laced networks that 429 cities have with one another ([54] p. S108). Nonetheless, they don't go further to link a multi-level 430 approach to cities and urban resilience and they do not seem very interested in the relationships 431 between these different urban levels and resilience processes.

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The relationships between these different urban levels and resilience processes implicitly exist 433 in the urban resilience discourse, although, because of the focus of this discourse only on one level, it

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is not yet conceptualized in a cities' context. Having shown the differences in approaches of urban 435 and regional resilience, we propose to consider them as complementary, for the creation of multi-436 level perspective to a city's resilience (Fig.4).  As it was shown in the previous sections, urban resilience research concerns intra-urban 440 processes that are mostly linked with cities' resilience to natural disasters on the city or community 441 scales. By contrast, the regional resilience approach highlights an embeddedness of regional 442 processes into macro levels, such as national or global. Taking a city as a unit of analysis, we propose 443 to consider urban resilience as being shaped both by the processes inside and between cities: this 444 way, a city is viewed as a meso-level connector between micro and macro processes.

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The notion of resilience has become an important research direction in many areas such as 488 ecology, urban and regional studies, complex systems and, therefore, evolved into a truly 489 multidisciplinary concept. In the beginning of this article, we explored resilience in a historical 490 perspective, identifying its evolution through three stages of development, namely 491 conceptualization, contextualization and operationalization. It has been shown that currently the 492 main question in resilience research is the empirical evaluation of resilience and its decomposition 493 into measurable parts.

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We have illustrated that due to the multi-disciplinary nature of the resilience notion, there is 495 often a confusion between quite similar, but still distinct terms such as vulnerability, adaptability, 496 transformability and sustainability. By conducting a literature review, we explored the differences 497 between resilience and sustainability as the terms that generate the biggest confusion. Taking a 498 perspective of complex systems approach, we explained the relationships between these terms 499 through the time-scale dynamics. We argued that resilience operates within adaptive cycles in short-500 term perspectives as a reaction to shocks, and sustainability is based on the predefined outcomes that 501 imply transformative change of a system in a long-term.

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By means of conceptual maps (graphs), we have analyzed the discourses of urban and regional 503 resilience based on a large sample of literature. It has been shown that in a large part of the literature 504 on urban resilience, the main topic is resilience to natural disasters and their consequences on city 505 and community levels. Our analysis has also underlined that concepts of urban resilience and 506 community resilience can be considered as synonyms, which adds to the general confusion around 507 the urban resilience approach. We have shown that urban resilience operates on the intra-urban level 508 Preprints (www.preprints.org) | NOT PEER-REVIEWED | Posted: 19 October 2018 doi:10.20944/preprints201810.0431.v1 14 of 18 and does not concern the influence of national and global levels on the city's persistence to shocks.

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Analyzing the regional resilience discourses, we have illustrated that as main shocks, scholars take 510 economic recessions and crises that come top-down from a macro level.

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We have proposed a multi-level perspective to urban resilience by introducing a micro level of 512 economic agents, for which the behavior can influence urban resilience during economic crises from 513 bottom-up, and macro level that highlights the embeddedness of cities into national and international 514 processes through a system of cities. In a perspective of the panarchy approach to urban resilience,

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we think that it is necessary to consider every level of a city -micro, meso and macro -as operating 516 within their own adaptive cycles, and urban resilience as a result of the interactions of these multi-517 level cycles dynamics. We are convinced that these cross-level interactions are crucial to a higher 518 comprehensive understanding of urban resilience that emphasize a nature of "a city as a system within 519 system of cities" [96]. By opening a discussion about the applications of the panarchy theory to urban 520 resilience, we aim to overcome the respective existing "lock in" in urban and regional resilience 521 research. We encourage scholars for more complex research in these areas that would go beyond the 522 current limitations, on the one hand, of one prevailing domain in each discourse (such as ecology in 523 urban resilience and economy in regional resilience), and on the other hand, limitations to one level 524 in order to emphasize the relations between different organizational levels.