Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

78 Table 2. Illustrative a definitions of urban climate resilience from local practitioner survey. When asked to rate the importance of these 16 characteristics (Table 3), survey respondents collectively indicated that they were all important. The mean score for all 16 was high (Figure 2), with very few respondents indicating that any of the characteristics were “1—unimportant” or only “2—slightly important” (Figure 3). Additionally, only five respondents listed an “other” characteristic, which could suggest that they were satisfied with the list. There is, however, some variation in the perceived importance of the characteristics. For example, robustness had the highest average rating, over 4 (very important), and the largest number of respondents who rated it 5 (critical). In contrast, decentralization had the lowest average ranking, although the mean score is still above 3 “important). A careful review of survey respondents’ collective rating of the 16 characteristics (Figure 2 and Figure 3) combined with those included in their free responses (Figure 4) points to key differences in what practitioners and the scholarly literature view as resilience. For example, some of the most commonly cited characteristics in the academic literature, such as diversity, redundancy, flexibility, decentralization, and adaptive capacity, were not among the highest rated by local government respondents. Conversely, practitioners emphasized the importance of robustness, yet there is debate in the literature about the universal desirability of this attribute. There were other characteristics commonly mentioned in the literature that practitioners simply did not focus on, including being predictable or safe- to-fail, iterative, having good systems for feedback, and transparency. Where scholars and local government respondents did seem to agree was on the importance of supporting environmental systems, equity, and integration. 4.1. Tensions between Resilience Characteristics in Theory and Practice In the urban resilience literature, robustness is about a system’s ability to resist change or disturbance: it is essentially about “strength” [22]. In the survey, the characteristic robustness was defined as “ensuring municipal-wide infrastructure and organizations can withstand external shocks and quickly return to the previous operational state”. Robustness is very similar to the notion of engineering resilience. If robustness is seen as a desirable characteristic of a system, it implies a wish to maintain the status quo. This is not controversial when thinking about certain scales or engineered systems; no one wants a building to collapse in a hurricane. But there are many other more problematic, but nonetheless robust, aspects of modern cities (i.e., inequality or the reliance on fossil fuels). Many