congress team: 
Pedro Garcia (Portugal/Canada) & Elizabeth Reynolds (UK)

To be resilient is to recover quickly after something difficult has occurred – how can human and natural elements be utilised to make our cities less vulnerable and more resilient? This track has a strong problem-solving focus and hopes to bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world, for a constructive debate on how we can better respond to the full spectrum of urban risks, most notably the global climate emergency. How can universal challenges and events of an overwhelming scale be addressed at a local, even site-specific level? How will transformation take place? What must be transformed? Who should take the lead?

Resilience can be implemented at political, economic, as well as social geographic levels and is discussed within the existing hierarchy of local, regional, national and international actors. There are effective new strategies that have emerged from bottom up initiatives. Protection of the urban environment and enhancement of urban resilience come from interdisciplinary and comparative cases. Recent research that proposes innovative resilience methodologies is also increasingly relevant. 

Papers on Safeguarding Urban Resilience could explore: 

• Network theories
• Data collection of environmental changes
• Carbon footprint
• Addressing CO2 emissions caused by urban transportation and buildings 
• Interpretation of adaptive strategies and ongoing research that contributes to the safeguarding of urban resilience
• The resources needed for more resilient cities
• Governing the resilient city – which models are most effective and to what extent should Governments intervene in places at repeat risk of extreme events
• The role of the built environment in making (or breaking) urban resilience
• The knowledge, policies and practices needed to understand resilience at a regional scale
• Techniques for moving to a mindset of preventive risk management, rather than cycles of crisis response and rebuilding 
• The architecture of resilience – contemporary case studies on exceptional infrastructure
• Tools for climate change adaptation including urban greening, floodable landscapes, self sufficiency and community engagement 
• Growing and sustaining strong communities