Urban form and fitness: Towards a space-morphological approach to general urban resilience

Urban form and fitness: Towards a space-morphological approach to general urban resilience

Forgaci, C.
Van Timmeren, A.

Architecture and The Built Environment

Urbanism

2014-06-18

Assessment is one of the greatest challenges of urban resilience research. The difficulty of this task arises from the increasing complexity of urban environments and from the unpredictability of external changes, two trends that have raised environmental awareness and, consequently, led to a growing debate on the relationship between city and nature. We join this debate by looking at urban resilience through the lens of urban form. We refer to urban form as a product of the continuous tension between recovery and adaptation on several spatial and temporal scales of transformation. Although recent resilience approaches, such as spatial resilience, general resilience, and urban resilience, have dealt with urban form indirectly, and, conversely, some studies in urban morphology have tried to grasp the complexity of urban-natural environments, an explicit morphological perspective on urban resilience is still lacking in research. The paper is divided in three main parts: formal treatments of resilience (spatial, urban, and general), resilience of urban form (fitness, performance, and sustainability), and a network perspective on the two concepts. It concludes with a discussion on the possibility of a spacemorphological approach to general urban resilience.

general urban resilience
urban form
environmental fitness
space-morphology

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9d427722-bca3-44c1-b10f-2d0d775d0653

International Sustainable Development Research Society (ISDRS)

ISDRC 2014: 20th Annual International Sustainable Development Research Conference "Resilience – The New Research Frontier", Trondheim, Norway, 18-20 June 2014; Authors version

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2014 The Author(s)
ISDRS