Title: Understanding the policy realities of urban transitions
Abstract: The global process of urbanization has left environmental, economic, and social consequences yet to be understood. One concern of scholars and urban administrators is the resilience of cities; how urban activities can ‘bounce back’ after a significant disturbance, and ‘bounce forward’ through learning and responding to these events (Seeliger and Turok 2013). This maintenance of urban function is salient in the context of cities, as their highly engineered landscapes can leave citizens vulnerable. With large socio-technical systems delivering essential services such as energy, water, transport, housing, and health care, there is an argument that urban populations in developed countries have moved from a modest level of self-reliance to high levels of technical reliance. Natural disasters provide the most frequent evidence of this vulnerability, exposing citizens when failure in large technocratic systems leaves them to provide for their own basic needs. In major cities in some developing countries, those without access to urban infrastructure services may be less reliant on central technologies, but their subsistence within the resources of the urban landscape is a daily struggle, made more difficult in times of crisis.