Resilience in the Transition Towns Movement. Towards a new Urban Governance

The concept of resilience has been widely studied in many disciplines (Seyfang, Haxeltine, 2009). First formulated in ecology (in the 1960s-1970s), this concept has influenced many other research fields including anthropology, human geography and other social sciences (Folke, 2006). Recently, it has also been discussed in the urban and regional planning sector becoming part of the vocabulary of spatial planning and entering debates in planning theory and practice (Davoudi and Porter, 2012; Papa, 2012). The first theoretical approach defined it as «the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedback» (Walker et al., 2004, p. 5). This definition is used in the spatial metaphor of “resilient city” (Newman et al., 2009; Otto-Zimmermann, 2011; Pickett et al., 2004). A more thorough inquiry (Folke, 2006) into the adaptive capacity of social-ecological systems underlined the real innovation of the concept of resilience (Papa, 2012). This second approach implies that cities are open adaptive complex systems (Portugali, 1999), that are able to self-regulate and create innovative solutions for urban development. This point of view allows the study of implementation of the concept of resilience in the Transition towns movement (Hopkins, 2008 and 2011). This movement has already spread into several contexts. Despite its phenomenal growth and the wave of positive publicity has received, there has to date been very little empirical research into the development and character of these initiatives, or the impact they have achieved.