Knowledge co-production in understanding, measuring functionality and performance of urban resilience

Abstract There has been a rapid increase in literature on resilience of social systems, which encampuses interventions to shocks and disasters of multiple dimensions of such systems. This follows the inclusion of resilience building in policy frameworks at global, regional to local levels. Cities across the world have enacted resilience strategies but these strategies fall short of comprehensively understanding risk to holistic urban systems. With urban systems considered as places of population concentration and increasingly exposed to risk and hazards, how urban resilience is conceptualized, understood, measured and represented continues to be an evolving and strong field for conceptual and analytical investigations. Urban resilience is described mostly by approaches that group people, infrastructure, ecosystems, institutions, entities, assessed with indices showing either resilient or vulnerable quite often after an event. There are, however, knowledge gaps regarding the spatial scale and time at which resilience is measured both of which are crucial for resilience planning. This paper endeavors to re-conceptualize urban resilience, the underpinnings of how the condition is understood and measured. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and multi-stakeholder workshops in Addis Ababa, Kampala and Lagos cities, the paper applies a knowledge co-production approach involving researchers, communities, urban development practitioners and policy actors. The paper makes two critical arguments: (1) knowledge co-production highlights that what is needed in urban resilience conceptualization can be applicable in scientific and policy practice; and (b) an urban resilience performance framework should consider interactions between functionality, shocks and response of units in urban systems. The performance framework incorporates ‘units’, scale, temporal aspects and a gradient along which the resilience can be measured.