Critical exploration of urban resilience concept from institutional power relations point of view

Urban resilience is one of the contemporary concepts in the urban planning realm which originates in the ecological science. Applying The ecological definition of resilience and following the descriptive approach, in context of multilayer and complex social-ecological systems like urban areas, can cause domination of depoliticizing inherently political concepts, which stemmed from natural sciences.

The main purpose of this article is analyzing the concept of urban resilience from institutional power relations point of view. Due to the arising conceptual challenges and criticism around urban resilience application, exploring the political dimension which is almost attached to concepts in social perspectives can be as a solution. Consequently, it can be exposed to multilayered character of urban areas in a more compatible trajectory.

To achieve the purpose, content analyze has been chosen as the fundamental method, based on theoretical literature review for extracting essential and original data.

The main result of this article is exploring different dimensions of urban resilience policy analysis in order to induce the political orientation for it. Concerning this, the interdependence between resilience goals in one hand and policies made by institutional power in the other hand have been considered. Accordingly the analysis of existing institutional power policies on the urban resilience practice is intended..

The choice of social perspective would be as a reliable path to weaken the challenges arising from unificationism approach in the definition of social-ecological resilience. In this regard, by proposing the institutional power relations as the social perspective in this article, three layers, which unfold main policy orientation, can be defined as: institutional and organizational capacity, development model in urban plans and legal rules and codes. It can be translated as a basic framework for policy analysis. Highlights: Focusing on the institutional power relations as the main policy – maker in urban areas in order to prevent the reductionism and depoliticizing the concept of urban resilience is the main point of this article.