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Driven by the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, decision makers have been striving to reorientate policy debates towards the aspiration of achieving urban resilience and monitoring the effectiveness of adaptive measures through the implementation of standardised indicators. Consequently, there has been a rise of indicator systems measuring resilience. This paper aims to argue that the ambition of making cities resilient does not always make them less vulnerable, more habitable, equitable and just.

Using an inductive policy analysis of ISO standard 37123:2019 “Sustainable cities and communities — Indicators for resilient cities”, the authors examine the extent to which the root causes of risks are being addressed by the urban resilience agenda.

The authors show that the current standardisation of resilience fails to adequately address the political dimension of disaster risk reduction, reducing resilience to a management tool and missing the opportunity to address the socio-political sources of risks.

Such critical analysis of the Standard is important as it moves away from a hazard-centric approach and, instead, permits to shed light on the socio-political processes of risk creation and to adopt a more nuanced and sensitive understanding of urban characteristics and governance mechanisms.

Few people living in informal settlements in the Global South spontaneously claim that they are “resilient” or “adapting” to disaster risk or climate change. Surely, they often overcome multiple challenges, including natural hazards exacerbated by climate change. Yet their actions are increasingly examined through the framework of resilience, a notion developed in the North, and increasingly adopted in the South. To what extent eliminate’ do these initiatives correspond to the concepts that scholars and authorities place under the resilience framework?

Three longitudinal case studies in Yumbo, Salgar and San Andrés (Colombia) serve to investigate narratives of disaster risks and responses to them. Methods include narrative analysis from policy and project documents, presentations, five workshops, six focus groups and 24 interviews.

The discourse adopted by most international scholars and local authorities differs greatly from that used by citizens to explain risk and masks the politics involved in disaster reduction and the search for social justice. Besides, narratives of social change, aspirations and social status are increasingly masked in disaster risk explanations. Tensions are also concealed, including those regarding the winners and losers of interventions and the responsibilities for disaster risk reduction.

Our findings confirm previous results that have shown that the resilience framework contributes to “depoliticize” the analysis of risk and serves to mask and dilute the responsibility of political and economic elites in disaster risk creation. But they also show that resilience fails to explain the type of socioeconomic change that is required to reduce vulnerabilities in Latin America.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS

MANAGING URBAN DISASTERS

HOMEWORKS - A NEW AMERICAN TOWNHOUSE

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a study of a post‐flood reconstruction project conducted in 2003 in the village of Bousalem in Tunisia, a country that is poorly documented in reconstruction literature and that is known for its high levels of centralization in decision making. It examines the relations between project stakeholders, the structure of the team established to conduct the project (the Temporary Multi‐Organisation, TMO) and the most important concerns of end‐users. It particularly shows the drawbacks of neglecting a participatory approach and favouring instead the centralization of decision making at different levels of the TMO organisational structure.

Users' satisfaction was assessed through technology transfer indicators, based on the qualitative analysis of several interviews with end‐users. The analysis of the organizational system was based on a qualitative analysis of the TMOs' formal and informal structuring.

The results confirm the need to decentralize decisions at a level that: optimizes the efficiency of local stakeholders; facilitates the participation of end‐users; and allows an appropriate distribution of responsibilities and risks among stakeholders.

The results show how certain decisions related to the structure and functioning of the TMO affect the match between the project initiators' capacity to provide an adequate solution and the users' expectations and requirements after the disaster.

The construction sector is notorious for the dichotomy between its intensive use of information in its decision‐making processes and its limited access to, and insufficient use of, the pertinent information that is potentially available, e.g. on the internet. This paper seeks to examine this issue. To solve this problem (the ‘problem of information aboutinformation’), a multidisciplinary team developed an online question‐answering (Q.‐A.)system that uses natural language for the query and the reply. The system provides a direct answer to questions posed by building industry participants, instead of providing a list of references (as is the case with most online information retrieval systems), much as if onewere asking a question of, and receiving a response from, an expert.It has the capabilitiesto process questions in natural language, to find appropriate fragments of answers indifferent web sites and to condense them into a paragraph, also written in natural language. The main features of the system are that it uses domain‐specific knowledge (in the form ofa hierarchical specialized thesaurus complemented by terms of fieldwork parlance),semantic categorization, a database of filtered and indexed web sites, and an online interface that is adapted to different profiles of actors in the construction sector. The testing process shows that the system goes beyond the lists of references and links provided by traditional search engines on the web.The Q.‐A.system already gives 70% of satisfactory answers. The Q.‐A.system can be applied to other business domains apart from information retrieval and decision‐making in the building sector. It is also possible to apply it to the exploitation of in‐house knowledge management database.

The aim of this paper is to add a new dimension to urban resilience by exploring how representations of disasters, reconstruction and human settlements are made, and how, by shaping plans and programs, they ultimately influence resilience.

The paper draws on James Scott's notion of “legibility” to ask how different representations simplify complex realities and how they are transformed into plans and programs. The paper first outlines the various broad analytic lens used to examine legibility to portray post‐disaster reconstruction, drawing on international literature and policies. The paper then focuses on post‐earthquake Haiti and analyzes eight reconstruction plans and reviews design proposals submitted for the Building Back Better Communities program to explore how different stakeholders portrayed the disaster, identified the reconstruction challenges and proposed to address human settlements.

Representations of the disaster, the reconstruction challenge and the housing problem were quite varied. While the plans assumed a very broad view of the reconstruction challenge (one that goes beyond the representations found in the literature), the BBBC program adopted a very narrow view of it (one that the literature condemns for failing to achieve sustainable resilience).

The empirical research is exploratory, suggesting an approach that throws a new light on the analysis of plans and programs for improved resilience.

The study suggests that the representations that decision makers, institutions and organizations make of the world ultimately establish the framework in which resilience is constructed.

The lens of legibility confirms that the expression of different representations makes the world legible in different ways and therefore transforms the way in which resilience can be improved.

Earthquakes strike without warning, even though they are known to recur. It is nonetheless difficult to mobilize resources to plan for them in advance, despite the high social and economic costs that can be anticipated, and despite the humanitarian obligation to provide quality and safe housing.

This research examines two post-earthquake housing reconstruction projects in rural areas of Turkey, where different procurement strategies were used. A top-down strategy was adopted in Dinar after the October 1995 earthquake; and a bottom-up strategy, was adopted in the Orta district in Cankiri after the June 2000 earthquake in the region.

Based on information obtained from government agencies, building contractors and the projects beneficiaries, a comparison has been made between the two procurement methods. While no generalized conclusions can be drawn – as the projects were conducted in the particular circumstances that prevail in rural areas of Turkey – it is possible to highlight key factors that can properly influence future housing procurement processes.

Focusing on Rudak, a village destroyed in the Buin-Zahra earthquake of 1962 in Qazvin, Iran, this paper aims to evaluate the reconstruction of this village in terms of sustainability. Rudak reconstruction has left long-term consequences on the physical structure of the village, as some of the people refused the constructed houses and built their own ones. Hence, after more than 50 years, this village is now consisted of two physically different neighborhoods. Examining the long-term consequences of this reconstruction through comparing housing and physical structure of the two different neighborhoods contains valuable lessons in terms of sustainability because sustainable reconstruction results unveil in long term.

Using sustainable reconstruction theory as the conceptual framework, this research investigates social, economic and environmental sustainability of Rudak housing reconstruction and that leads to comprehensive lessons. The study has a qualitative method and is based on fieldwork allowing for dynamic interviews with the community. Furthermore, data are analyzed through descriptive and comparative approaches.

The research concluded that sustainability related implications of post-disaster reconstruction policies are not restricted to the time of reconstruction or a limited interval after that. Lack of livelihood considerations, providing all people with similar houses and nontransparent decisions, resulted in unsustainable consequences such as building vulnerable extensions by people, social segregation and people unwillingness for participation. However, this experience was sustainable in terms of some other factors. For example, using local materials for building the structures of the new houses, putting the houses on the natural bedrock and building public services for people were sustainable measurements.

This paper is a rare example of research focusing on impacts of post-disaster reconstruction after more than 50 years. It contains valuable lessons for planners and architects.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an update of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) campaign on Making Cities Resilient.

An opinion piece written by the Director a.i. of UNISDR and the Editors of the International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment.

The campaign will continue and the focus will shift to more implementation support, city‐to‐city learning and cooperation, local action planning and monitoring of progress in cities.

Continued advocacy will seek to commit more cities and increase the support by national governments to support city resilience and local capacities.