Distressed Cities and Resilience : Social Possibilities and Contexts

Bringing together a multi-disciplinary team of scholars, this progressive volume peels back major concepts such as 'urban distress', 'resilience', 'sustainability', 'risk', creative cities through various formats of conversation, including dialogues, comments, debates, essays, and interviews. In doing so, it broadens the discourse on distress in cities and helps us to understand the dynamics of communities and the genealogy of their problems, as well as informing our practices and planning aimed at preventing, mitigating or reversing distress.

As each city has a unique history and has unique social, political and economic dimensions, scholarship cannot apply established concepts and tools to every city in the same way.

Following on from chapters which emphasize the varied historical and geographical context of urban distress, and the different understandings of the concept resilience in the social sciences as well as in public policy, the volume critically examines distress as a concept or an empirical factor to think critically about how we scale, measure, understand, and revitalize distressed cities.

By contextualizing certain notions, this volume sheds light on common planning, design and policy practices and how they could be different.