Sustainable Resilience or Resilient Sustainability?

Sustainability and resilience have become key concepts in new approaches to urban development. However, an understanding of these concepts and how they apply to cities is still being developed. While both concepts are regarded as important imperatives, it unclear how they relate to each other and whether one should be prioritised over the other. For instance, should models of future urban development aim for sustainable resilience, or for, resilient sustainability?

This paper reviews the concepts of sustainability and resilience from first principles and extrapolates implications for urban areas and the built environment. This is used to develop, and define minimum built environment standards and identify important physical characteristics associated with these concepts.

The paper finds that while resilience is a valuable way of considering how urban environments can be developed and managed to accommodate change, resilience should not take precedence over sustainability. The paper argues that sustainability should be a primary overriding concern in urban development processes and that resilience considerations should be drawn on to enhance this approach. The paper identifies key built environment resilient sustainability characteristics and describes how these can be integrated into urban areas and buildings. Finally the paper suggests that further research into these characteristics could provide valuable insight into how resilience and sustainability, or more specifically, resilient sustainability, can be integrated into built environments.



KEYWORDS: Built environment sustainability tool, BEST, Resilience, Sustainability, Urban

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