Spatial Resilience in Planning: Meanings, Challenges, and Perspectives for Urban Transition

The Chapter aims to define Spatial Resilience concept in the planning domain. Spatial resilience is the ability of a territorial system to bounce back to desired functions after unexpected shocks and disturbances in order to improve its adaptive capacity intending to evolve all its material and immaterial components toward a new territorial system’s organization. The theoretical perspective assumed in this definition is that spatial resilience is not a “fixed asset” but a dynamic and continuous process in which unexpected changes provide for social, economic, and environmental strengths of territorial systems. In other words, spatial systems become more or less resilient depending on their ability to enhance their chances of resisting disturbances (ability to be recoverable), or absorbing disturbances without crossing an irreversible threshold (ability to be adaptable), or moving toward new trajectories of development (ability to be evolutionary).