Developing a Conceptual Framework of Urban Resilience for its Application in Urban Literature, through Thematic Analysis of Texts

Urban resilience is an approach, developed to respond to different unpredictable disasters. It is hypothesized that besides capacity, resistance and ability, there are other elements involved in urban resilience that have to be extracted. It seeks to develop a conceptual framework for urban resilience and to present its characteristics through a systematic review of the updated publications. Second, it proposes an inclusive definition of urban resilience, relying on the results of this study, finally, the qualitative data are reviewed to shed light on hidden aspects of urban resilience. This is a qualitative research in which thematic analysis, MAXQDA 13.28 software is used to understand and analyze the data. A collection of 100 publications containing definition of resilience was gathered as data, based on which six characteristics for conceptual framework of urban resilience were extracted as R1 to R6. The extracted results, were confirmed by expert panel and also the keywords were used in CiteSpace software to confirm their inclusion in 1250 published papers in the international journals under WOS index over the period of 2010 to 2020 (i.e. the papers which had ‘urban resilience’ and ‘urban resiliency’ phrases in their topics) and the results were supported. The authors define: “urban resilience is ability of cities to respond in timely manner and to resist during occurring natural or man-made disasters; while adapting and coordinating with new situations, in case of not being collapsed, they will continue their urban functions stronger than the past.”