Urban Resilience

Why do we focus on urban resilience?

For nearly two decades, the Earth's population has been predominantly urban. Cities attract people with opportunities: better-paying jobs, access to education, culture, public services, and business networks. They are hubs of innovation and socio-economic development.

However, urbanisation has a flip side. It impacts the environment, climate, and public safety. High concentrations of people and infrastructure make cities particularly vulnerable to sudden events—from extreme weather, floods, and fires, to traffic accidents, pandemics, economic crises, and armed conflicts.

There is no single universal model of urban resilience. Cities differ in size, social structure, and natural conditions, so each requires its own solutions. Nevertheless, all cities are complex socio-ecological systems, so the need for comprehensive preparedness for crises and shocks remains universal.

Urban resilience is not just about reacting to emergencies, but also about planning ahead, inter-institutional cooperation, and creating conditions that allow to cope with uncertainty. All of this is underpinned by the awareness that an urban economy shapes the ability to finance the environment, that urban nature impacts society and the economy, and that the effectiveness of responding to threats depends on the efficiency of local government institutions.

Why an urban resilience index?

The first step in building urban resilience is a reliable assessment of an urban system’s preparedness for shocking events. Bearing in mind that Polish local and regional statistics lack a solution enabling a comprehensive assessment of urban resilience, we have created an urban resilience index designed to fill this gap and ensure:

1. Repeatability over time, by basing it on regularly published, publicly available, open data
2. Comparability across locations – in the pilot phase, we developed an indicator for 44 Polish cities, which were the first in Poland to adopt so-called Urban Climate Change Adaptation Plans, but we plan to scale this tool for further cities.
3. Applicability to second-tier cities and smaller settlements in the urban hierarchy, as existing, similar indicators are currently available only for capital cities or the world’s largest metropolises (e.g. 1(opens in a new tab), 2(opens in a new tab))
4. Comprehensiveness, bearing in mind the economic, social, environmental, infrastructural and institutional contexts of resilience.

Who is the urban resilience index for?

The indicator is primarily intended for local authorities of second-tier cities in the settlement hierarchy and medium-sized cities, as defined by the functional classification of Polish cities(Śleszyński, 2014(opens in a new tab)). Previous research on urban resilience has either concerned a small number of cities on a global scale (most often global cities) or national capitals or has been limited to a few aspects (usually in the context of responses to individual natural phenomena or armed conflicts). However, there is a lack of analyses of smaller local authorities; therefore, based on existing research and methodological advances, we have attempted to develop an indicator that takes into account the specific characteristics of smaller towns.

How we understand urban resilience

We understand resilience as (Meerow i Newell, 2016(opens in a new tab), p. 45):

1. The ability to maintain or rapidly restore desired functions following disruptions such as:

• natural disasters (earthquakes, floods and hurricanes),
• events resulting from the effects of climate change (prolonged droughts, flash floods, etc.),
• pandemics,
• sudden disruptions to energy supplies,
• migration pressures (e.g. sudden inflows or outflows of people),
• structural changes in the economy with long-term effects (e.g. the closure of major businesses in the city),
• economic crises and shocks,
• sudden influxes or outflows of population,
• political changes, including those of a military nature.

2. Adaptability, i.e. the ability to adjust to changes and the city’s rapid transformation to new conditions once the disruptions have ceased.

Methodology and selection of variables

The analysis for the first period of the indicator covered the average for the years 2018–2023/2024 (depending on the availability of data in official statistics). This period covered both the time before and after the pandemic, as well as the start and subsequent course of the war in Ukraine. The variables were categorised according to their impact on resilience, specifically into stimulants (where higher values indicate a higher level of urban resilience) and destimulants, which have the opposite effect. Normalisation was then performed using the static zero-unitisation method. For each sub-area, a resilience measure and the arithmetic mean at the level of individual indicators were calculated. Based on a review of existing measures of urban resilience, we proposed dividing the target indicator (I. main) into three internally coherent and proportionally sub-areas. This division stems from the logic of social and environmental-spatial processes, as well as the specific nature of institutional conditions, drawing on previous research. We based our analysis on three main areas of resilience: socio-economic (A. Socio-Economic), environmental (A. Environmental-Spatial) and institutional (A. Institutional).

The selection of variables accounted for spatial variation and low correlation among them. The degree of variability was assessed using the variation coefficient (V) and variables with |V| > 10%. were retained. The degree of correlation was assessed using Spearman’s correlation coefficient and statistical significance tests (using Student’s t-test with n-2 degrees of freedom and a significance level of α=0,05). Based on publicly available local-level data in Poland, 55 indicators were proposed across three sub-areas (socio-economic, environmental, and institutional) and 13 categories. The list of proposed measures was checked against data availability. To calculate the aggregated urban resilience index, we assigned equal weights to each sub-area, category, and indicator. Further details, including a list of variables and data sources, are available in the working paper(opens in a new tab).

Selected publications

• Project’s working paper: Measuring Urban Resilience in Poland: A Practical Index for Local Governments(opens in a new tab)
• The chapter ‘(Un)natural disasters and urban resilience’ in Carl Abbott’s (2024) book Urban Planning: A Short Introduction(opens in a new tab) (trans. Mariusz E. Sokołowicz), Łódź, University of Łódź Press
• Subsection 2.2, ‘Between Standardisation and Complexity in Mass Society’, and Chapter 3 in the book by Mariusz E. Sokołowicz (2024). In Praise of the Golden Mean: On Intermediate Solutions in Spatial Economics(opens in a new tab). Łódź: University of Łódź Press.

Seminal academic papers

• Amirzadeh, M., Sobhaninia, S., & Sharifi, A. (2022). Urban resilience: A vague or an evolutionary concept? Sustainable Cities and Society, 81, 103853. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2022.103853(opens in a new tab)
• Figueiredo, L., Honiden, T., & Schumann, A. (2018). Indicators for Resilient Cities. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/6f1f6065-en(opens in a new tab)
• Glaeser, E. L. (2022). Urban resilience. Urban Studies, 59(1), 3–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211052230(opens in a new tab)
• Masik, G. A. (2022). Koncepcja odporności: Definicje, interpretacje, podejścia badawcze oraz szkoły myśli. Przegląd Geograficzny, 94(3), 279–305. https://doi.org/10.7163/PrzG.2022.3.1(opens in a new tab)
• Meerow, S., Newell, J. P., & Stults, M. (2016). Defining urban resilience: A review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 147, 38–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.11.011(opens in a new tab)
• Sokołowicz, M. E., & Wójcik, M. (2025). The concept of intersectionality in spatial terms: – An impulse for a socially engaged science. Studia Miejskie, 50, 61–76. https://doi.org/10.25167/sm.5880(opens in a new tab)
• Simmie, J., & Martin, R. (2010). The economic resilience of regions: Towards an evolutionary approach. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 3(1), 27–43. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsp029(opens in a new tab)
• Śleszyński, P. (2014). Delimitation and typology of functional urban regions in Poland based on commuting, 2006. Geographia Polonica, 87(2), 317–320. https://doi.org/10.7163/GPol.2014.20(opens in a new tab)

The Project and Our Team

The project “Urban resilience versus civilization challenges and sustainable development goals: operationalization, measurement and popularization” was founded by the University of Lodz as part of an increased subsidy from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education within the Excellence Initiative – Research University programme(IDUB).