Urban resilience can be broadly defined as the ability of a city to respond to and recover from shocks and stresses. Over the past decade, urban resilience policies have gained momentum among urban policy makers, mainly as a response to growing environmental risks in cities. It has however been criticised for its over-technocratic approach and lack of attention to social justice and equity issues in cities.
In this “discussion-podcast”, Emma Spruce and Floriane Ortega explore and question the links between gender inequalities and urban resilience, discussing how gendered power relations play out in urban spaces and how they might increase in the aftermath of disaster. They will talk about the ways to better include gender as a critical concept when planning for and responding to shocks in cities, as well as the challenges raised by a gender-aware approach to policy making, drawing notably on the lessons learnt from the COVID-19 crisis.
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More about this
- MacGregor, S. (2009). “A stranger silence still: the need for feminist social research on climate change”, The Sociological Review, 57(2), pp. 124-140.
- Meerow, S., Newell, J. 2019. “Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why?”. Urban Geography, 40, pp. 309-329.
- Kronsell, A. (2013). “Gender and transition in climate governance”, Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, 7(1), pp.1-15.
- Spruce, E. (2016). “Bigot Geography: Queering Geopolitics in Brixton”, in S. Avery and K. Graham (Eds.) Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London, 1850 to the Present. Bloomsbury: 65-80.
- Wijsmana, K., Feagan, M. (2019). “Rethinking knowledge systems for urban resilience: feminist and decolonial contributions to just transformations”, Environment Science and Policy, 98, pp.70- 76.
