Urbanization and urban areas are profoundly altering the relationship between society
and the environment, and affecting cities’ sustainability and resilience in complex ways at alarming
rates. Over the last decades, sustainability and resilience have become key concepts aimed at
understanding existing urban dynamics and responding to the challenges of creating livable urban
futures. Sustainability and resilience have also moved and are now core analytic and normative
concepts for many scholars, transnational networks and urban communities of practice. Yet, even with
this elevated scholarly attention, strategies for bridging between research and practice remain elusive,
and efforts to understand and affect change towards more sustainable and resilient urban centers
have often fallen short. This paper seeks to synthesize, from this issue’s papers and other strands of
literature, the knowledge, theory and practice of urban sustainability and resilience. Specifically, we
focus on what capacities urban actors draw on to create sustainability and resilience and how different
definitions of these concepts intersect, complement, or contradict each other. We then examine the
implications of those intersections and differences in the efforts by urban actors to enhance the
capacity to change unsustainable trajectories and transform themselves, their communities, and their
cities toward sustainable and resilient relationships with the environment.
More papers about urban sustainability:
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