Abstract
Pandemics, climate hazards, unprecedented events and other surprises emerge out of the future and influence the urban environment often in a contradictive way. Pursuing sustainable cities aims to create a balance in the environmental quality along with social and economic needs of the urban life. It ensures that essential resources are available for the urban population without compromising access of future generation as well as ecological and human well-being. This has only limited effect when greater resilience is required. The types of disruptive change that agglomerations may encounter now and in the future are often not predictable, highly uncertain, and accordingly may dictate an alternative approach for urban development and sustainability principles. City planning may better embrace agile and adaptive capacities, at higher levels, than what is currently applied. This is only possible when urban planners think in transformations of current planning, process and practices. Agile management and design approaches should lead to provide a new pathway for adaptive and resilient agglomeration, which is capable of transforming disruptions swiftly through its embedded adaptability principles. The urban factors, spaces and buildings, in this approach, ought to become flexible enough to anticipate whatever the future may bring. It would then be able to deal with heatwaves, floods, excessive rainfall, droughts, epidemics and pandemics with sufficient resilience to continue sustainable living as reasonably could be achieved. In this paper, the key principles of the above approach; Agile Resilient Cities, will be illustrated along with planning and design recommended concepts for Metropolitan Doha and the Dutch province of Groningen.
