Resilience Characteristics:

• Persistent: A persistent city anticipates impacts in order to prepare itself for current and future shocks and stresses. It builds robustness by incorporating coping mechanisms to withstand disturbances and protect people and assets. It encourages redundancy in its networks by generating spare capacity and back-ups to maintain and restore basic services, ensuring reliability during and after disruption.
• Adaptable: An adaptable city considers not only foreseeable risks, but also accepts current and future uncertainty. Going beyond redundancy, it diversifies its services, functions and processes by establishing alternatives. It is resourceful in its capacity to repurpose human, financial and physical capital. It pursues a flexibility that encourages it to absorb, adjust and evolve in the face of changing circumstances, dynamically responding by turning change into opportunity.
• Inclusive: An inclusive city centres on people by understanding that being resilient entails protecting each person from any negative impact. Recognising that people in vulnerable situations are among the most affected by hazards, it actively strives towards social inclusion by promoting equality, equity, and fulfilment of human rights. It fosters social cohesion and empowers comprehensive and meaningful participation in all governance processes in order to develop resilience.
• Integrated: An integrated city appreciates that it is composed of and in influenced by indivisible, interdependent, and interacting systems. It combines and aligns many lenses to ensure input is holistic, coherent, and mutually supportive towards a common cause. It enables a transdisciplinary collaboration that encourages open communication and facilitates strategic coordination.
• Reflexive: A reflexive city understands that its system and surroundings are continuously changing. It is aware that past trends have shaped current urban processes yet appreciates its potential to transform through shocks and stresses over time. It is reflective, conveying the capacity to learn from knowledge, past experiences, and new information. It also learns by doing and installs mechanisms to iteratively examine progress as well as systematically update and improve structures.
• Transformative: A transformative city adopts a proactive approach to building resilience in order to generate positive change. It actively strives to alleviate and ultimately eradicate untenable circumstances. It fosters ingenuity and pursues forward-looking, innovative solutions that over time create a system that is no longer prone to risk. A transformative city is focused and goal-oriented towards a shared vision of the resilient city.