RISUD Public Lecture – Resilience to Risk or Resilient Risk? Critical Reflections on Urban Resilience in Times of Climate Crisis

Disasters occur in time and space. The dominant temporal framing is that of a sudden “event”, triggered by a hazard – and that its risk can be reduced if we ‘build resilience’. But this can obscure the fact that risk builds up over long periods of time, as systems of oppression make some people more vulnerable than others. Approaching resilience building with only the goal of mitigating against future hazards obscures the inherent contradictions in social relations.

This lecture builds on the premise that disaster risk is created in and by human society and that the urban environment physically defines socially constructed risk. It explores why innovations towards urban resilience that are devoid of power and class critiques fail to stop the creation of new risk through status quo development and re-development activities, and what needs to be done to meaningfully reduce disaster risks in the time of climate crisis.