Integrating Resilience Concept and Urban Morphology. A contradictory merging attempt or a promising combination?

Today cities are particularly vulnerable to any kind of pressures. The increase in urban complexity requires a better understanding of physical urbanization, and parallelly a shift in how cities are linked to environmental dynamics. Tackling the urban complexity requires a socio-ecological system-view where cities appear living and dynamic systems, whose processes and structures are interacting over time at morphological, ecological and socio-cultural levels. These interdependencies can be handled by understanding the extent to which urban forms will be able to resist, adapt to or evolve under pressures and fulfil needs and functions either similar or different from their original ones. However, the explicit introduction of the element of change in the urban morphology field might contrast with the traditional image of built environment linked to order and rigidity. To this regard, resilience concept appears an interesting lens through which reading and understanding the changing urban-world. The paper explores the combination of urban morphology and co-evolutionary resilience, considering urban form as a key factor in urban resilience. Dealing with some resilient-morphological aspects, the work discusses possible interdependencies between resilience theory and urban morphology and seeks to understand if “resilient urban form” represents a “property” of cities or rather an “end-point”.