Define urban resilience and give an example of a planning measure to improve resilience.

• A. Urban resilience is a city's ability to absorb, adapt, and recover from shocks; measures include flood defenses, diversified infrastructure, and flexible land-use policies that allow rapid reconfiguration.
• B. Urban resilience focuses only on economic resilience.
• C. Urban resilience means never changing land-use patterns.
• D. Urban resilience is the sole concern of emergency services capacity.

Answer: (D)

Urban resilience is a city’s ability to absorb, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses while keeping essential functions running. A planning measure that strengthens resilience should address multiple system layers and enable quick adaptation after a disruption. For example, flood defenses protect against water-related shocks; diversified infrastructure creates redundancy so a single failure doesn’t cascade through the system; and flexible land-use policies allow rapid reconfiguration of spaces and activities when needs change. Together, these approaches show how planning can reduce vulnerability and speed recovery across physical, social, and economic dimensions.

Resilience isn’t only about economic strength, nor does it mean never changing how land is used. It also isn’t solely the concern of emergency services capacity; those services matter, but resilience requires coordinated responses across infrastructure, governance, and communities.