REFRAMING URBAN RESILIENCE 2028
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE | March 2028, Barcelona
Our 2018 conference opened with a warning: in the face of planetary emergency, national leadership was failing to act, and it was cities and regions that were stepping up to cut emissions, use resources more sustainably, and build resilience. That idea of urban resilience quickly spread beyond city plans into the wider language of sustainable development, adaptation, disaster risk reduction, and climate policy.
Ten years on, and despite a decade of research into resilience, its trade-offs, and its many paths to implementation, we’re still facing the same systemic challenges. So we’re gathering again to summarise the work that has been done, but also to ask what comes next, and which approaches might lead to different outcomes, so that ten years from now, these statements are no longer so urgent.
We’ll be asking what the state of the art in resilience thinking looks like today, and where it needs to go. What new ways of thinking about the built environment can move us past the limits of the sustainability and resilience discourse? How do we keep pace with a faster-changing world while holding onto not just human well-being, but the flourishing of all life on this planet? How do we make this work more just, more participatory, more and more democratic? And how do we start finding processes that actually address what’s burning locally?
The Urban Resilience Research Network is organising a conference in March 2028 to address these and other burning questions. Leading up to the conference, we’re hosting a series of events to explore these themes and make space for new questions to emerge from both research and practice.
UPCOMING EVENTS IN 2026
URBAN RESILIENCE: DEAD-ENDS AND WAYS FORWARD | 9 NOV, BARCELONA
It has been two decades since the UNISDR launched the first Making your City Resilient Campaign,
followed in 2015 by the integration of resilience within UN-Habitat’s sustainable agenda, as it
happened for numerous local urban policy frameworks globally. Over these twenty years, cities have
approached resilience through engineering, social-ecological, community, and socio-technical lenses,
triggering intense academic debates (especially between 2012 and 2018) around definitions,
foundational meanings, and core principles of urban resilience. The academic literature is rich of
critical debates around the need of integrating transformative capacities to adaptation, to integrate
justice within resilience or exploring resilience trade-offs and implementation challenges.
Nowadays, looking at 2030, the complexity of urban resilience definitions, approaches, and
frameworks sounds already widely explored. We feel it is time to offer a critical wrap-up and
reflections around which were the main contributions of resilience to cities, which were the
shortcomings, and which is the constructive way forward.
UNCONFERENCE ON REGENERATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT | 10-11 DEC, BARCELONA
Interest in regenerative development and design has grown a lot in recent years, both in research and in practice. Connected to the built environment, consultancies and organisations are starting to use it as guidance in their work; some research institutions have built frameworks, and we’re seeing more events and courses addressing related topics. This growing interest reflects a search for different ways of doing things, approaches that are more relational and pay more attention to human and ecological wellbeing. But there’s still a lot to explore.
The unconference is an invitation to think differently and more holistically about our built environment, and to map and imagine together a future where the built environment can support the flourishing of all life. At the unconference, we aim to explore the different aspects of how we might translate regenerative ideas into architecture, urban planning, community work, placemaking, governance and other related fields.
The event is an unstructured conference (“unconference”) where the agenda is created by the attendees, bringing what they’re curious about: a walk and talk, a workshop, a hands-on session, a half-formed idea.
This is a collective sensing exercise: we want to map what’s alive in the field, emerging practices, open questions, tensions, blind spots, and what’s happening on the ground, in research, in communities when they are trying to work regeneratively in the built environment.
The event is also an experiment in gathering differently, asking questions like how can we exchange knowledge, make decisions, and organise ourselves in ways that embody the regenerative principles we talk about.