Improving the Conditions for Urban Resilience through Collaborative Learning of Parisian Urban Services

Abstract

The concept of urban resilience has taken a leading edge by incorporating the multiscalar interactions within an urban system, revealing the short- and long-term impacts, spatial dependencies, and inequalities. The issue now is to enable local authorities and urban stakeholders to grasp and apply the resilience approach. Technical networks and urban services supporting urban development (drinking water supply, public transportation, etc.) are an interesting case study to apply the resilience concept. The urban resilience approach, tested with the managers of service provision in the City of Paris, demonstrates the effectiveness of integration and collaboration. First, an autodiagnosis realized with each manager identifies the service dependencies and its capacity for continuous operation in case of disturbance. Then workshops raise manager awareness of their interdependencies and feed the discussion toward technical and organizational solutions in an integrated approach. This macroscopic analysis is then completed by a territorial assessment of urban service resilience. In doing so, the spatial and temporal dimensions emphasize gaps but also margins of manoeuver in managing resilient urban services. Our results show that manager strategies can be focused on protection, adaptation, or recovery of their service. However, these are sometimes contradictory and threaten the resilience of the whole system. Indeed, in highlighting the different strategies set up by managers, the region’s resilience can be discussed at different scales: the urban service, the system of urban services, the City of Paris, and the Parisian metropolis. Then we emphasize the difficulties in applying the resilience concept and suggest solutions to improve the conditions for urban resilience and sustainability.