Special Issue Bridging the Gap. The Measure of Urban Resilience

Over the last few years, resilience has emerged as a “new way of thinking” for dealing with cities’ uncertainties and challenges. As promoted by UN Sustainable Development Goal 11, urban resilience is increasingly seen as a driver for change. At the same time, resilience is commonly criticized for being too ambiguous and an “empty signifier”, as it is difficult to operationalize it. Although several frameworks have been already proposed to “capturing resilience” in both the academic and public discourse, the existing approaches are confined to measure specific disturbances so that less attention has been directed to consider resilience as a continually changing process. In a nutshell, the developed methods of resilient metrics are set indicators of what is easy to measure rather than what is important. This Special Issue seeks to synthesize the state-of-the-art knowledge on theories and practices on measuring urban resilience. In particular, we are particularly interested in both empirical and theoretical papers that address one or more of the following questions: What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? How can urban resilience a property to be measured? What are the existing models and methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a method for measuring urban resilience need to have to guide properly adaptation and territorial governance? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalizing cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?