After the 2018 International Conference Reframing Urban Resilience Implementation: Aligning Sustainability and Resilience, we believe it is time to gather again for an international state of the art of urban resilience research and practice, ten years after. Let us introduce the rationale behind Reframing Urban Resilience 2028.
We are approaching an important deadline in 2030, when the UN New Urban Agenda, the SDGs and other international frameworks promoting resilience will face the challenge of taking stock of their impacts and planning the way forward towards 2050.
The international policy uptake of urban resilience accelerated from the mid-2000s, and the concept subsequently spawned a growing number of frameworks, agendas and approaches, reaching its peak around 2015. Scholars have followed and contributed to this growing body of work, while critical perspectives also emerged early on, questioning the meaning and implications of resilience and its application in urban planning and policy. The unclear relationship between sustainability and resilience was at the centre of these debates for a while, especially as overlaps between the two concepts were increasingly incorporated into frameworks and plans without necessarily addressing the multiple trade-offs.
Because of these questions, we perceived in 2016 the need to organise an international conference exploring how urban resilience was being translated into practice. Reframing Urban Resilience Implementation: Aligning Sustainability and Resilience brought together perspectives on the tensions, trade-offs and consistency gaps between resilience and sustainability, with the main insights subsequently published through 24 papers in a Special Issue of Cities.
From that conference, which explored the trade-offs and gaps between theories and practices of urban resilience, we feel it is time now to ask what more than 15 years of work in urban resilience can teach us. Where are the success stories? Where have resilience approaches fallen short? What shortcomings, tensions and trade-offs have emerged? And what might need to be reframed as we look towards 2050?
With three years until the 2030 deadline, it is time to critically examine what has been achieved through urban resilience research and practice, what remains unresolved, and what needs to be reconsidered for the decades ahead. This is the starting point for a second Reframing Urban Resilience conference in 2028.
In the following months, we are organising an International Symposium (November 2026), bringing together URNet board members’ perspectives on the shortcomings and ways forward of urban resilience, alongside a series of unconferences to lay the groundwork for other concepts feeding into and potentially complementing resilience for a 2050 agenda.
If you wish to organise an un-conference, join the network and write to us.