Introduction to ‘Urban Disaster Resilience and Security—Addressing Risks in Societies’

Resilience as a term carries an emphasis on temporal development after an event. It also stresses the phase of rebounding after an impact. There is still a lack of disaster resilience operationalization or measurement, which impairs the credibility of the multi-facetted resilience concept, for both science and decision-making. On the other hand, measurability and bouncing back conceptualisations are criticised on multiple grounds; myopia on the range of holistic abilities commonly associated with resilience and neglect of context better to be captured with qualitative approaches. Addressing risks in societies prompts investigating all aspects of resilience conceptualisation and attempts at assessing it—and it is the ambition of this book to highlight examples and at the same time critically reflecting about their reach and limitations. Security and resilience are both terms used for framing a whole field of research and policy. Overlaps are hardly researched, however and the edited chapters will address certain recent aspects that will help to identify features for a common understanding and framework of risk, security and resilience. Urban areas are used here as a common denominator of human values and assets, exposed to different types of external and internal threats to security, which stimulate different types of resilience.