Resilient Europe

The cities in the URBACT Resilient Europe network work together to learn and share experiences with the aim to foster resilience and sustainability.

Urban Resilience is the capacity of urban systems, communities, individuals, organisations and businesses to recover or maintain their function and thrive in the aftermath of a shock or stress – regardless its impact, frequency, or magnitude. Becoming more resilient means that a city strives to enhance its ability to bounce back and grow stronger and better in the face of the chronic stresses and acute shocks. As such, city resilience is a continuous challenge for individuals, communities, institutions, business and infrastructure to address current trends and future transitions. In the Resilient Europe project, the challenges and opportunities of achieving resilience in and of our cities are explored.

The approach of Resilient Europe is to learn from each other, share experiences and to apply the lessons from the innovative governance approach of Transition Management. Transition Management is a process-oriented and participatory steering approach that enables social learning through iterations between collective vision development and experimenting. Transition Management is applied to structure dialogues and co-creation processes in every city and across the cities. This way, we aim to discover what city resilience means for each specific city, and to enable translation and identification of resilience aspirations of stakeholders. Subsequently, we aim to formulate an Integrated Action Plan to pave the ground for achieving city resilience.

Read more about the project, events and publications on the URBACT website.

Duration of the project
The project runs from September 2015 until May 2018.

Funding
Resilient Europe is funded by URBACT III programme (2014-2020), developed to continue to promote sustainable integrated urban development and contribute to the delivery of the Europe 2020 strategy. The URBACT project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and national and local contributions.

Partners
Lead Partner: URBACT is working closely with EU-wide organizations and European Territorial Cooperation Programmes. For the Resilient Europe project, these cities are partnering: Rotterdam, Glasgow, Antwerp, Bristol, Potenza, Ioannina, Thessaloniki, Burgas – Katowice, Malmö, Vejle.

DRIFT Team
Niki Frantzeskaki and Chris Roorda