Urban Landscapes and Resilience. Exploring an adaptive design perspective

Resilience thinking in urban planning and design has emerged in recent years as a powerful mean to foster research and innovation both in theory and practice. Starting from a definition of cities as complex adaptive systems, living organisms in a non-equilibrium context and spaces of intense man-nature interactions and interdependences, the paper aims to explore the role that ecosystem services have in building urban resilience. Global change and uncertainty ask for a strategic approach towards urban resilience through adaptive design. While an equilibrium-based view tends to look for an ideal sustainable urban form, recognizing a non-equilibrium dynamic perspective means incorporating flexibility and a learning-by-doing approach in urban planning and design. Thus, urban nature and blue-green infrastructures providing multiple ecosystem services are explored as possible spaces of opportunity and design experimentation for resilience, requiring and encouraging a transdisciplinary approach in urban landscape planning and design processes.