K6ET 2095 - Urban Resilience: from concept to practice

This workshop is an introduction to urban resilience as a concept driving transformative local public policies. It is designed to share inspirations, empirical knowledge, tools and methods with future practitioners. Students will discuss notions and explore theories and controversies on urban resilience, its definitions, normative frameworks and challenges. They will discover tools for strategy building processes – resilience assessment methods, qualities of urban systems and resilience principles for policy design, impact monitoring and evaluation. Through case studies in European Cities, students will try the “urban resilience lenses” and analyze concrete situations. The last part of the workshop will focus on governance challenges for systemic transition and explore how to drive urban transitions embracing complexity and uncertainty. Eventually, this workshop should help students not only understand how to conceive urban policies “resilient by design”, but also to grasp to what extent urban resilience can be a relevant approach for local governance and crisis management.

6 x 2 hours sessions. The course consists in 3 workshops of 4 hours. Each session will combine presentations and discussions. Some of them will include hands-on exercises as well as group presentations by the students during the last session. The workshop will rely on student's active participation.

This Workshop is validated 2 ECTS. Students will be assessed on group work (presentations prepared and delivered during the workshop – 70%), as well as on their class participation (contribution during class as well as a critical reflection on the workshop – 30%)

3 hours per week. Students are expected to actively participate and work in small groups (2-3) on a city strategy for which they will deliver a presentation in class at the end of the workshop. Each group will be in charge of designing a « resilience strategy » (taking the form of a short policy-brief) for a medium-sized city, based on a diagnosis the students will establish in close cooperation with the mayor’s office and oriented on 2 to 3 main lines of work.