Resilience strategies: upgrading the sustainable practice

Abstract

Climate change has become one of the biggest challenges for the sustainable development of cities - the rapid urbanization, marking the late 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, has highlighted cities as main arenas for testing and addressing the effects of climate change. Due to their complexity, the cities generate their own (changeable) logic, which affects their physical, functional and social structure. Constantly "revisioning" and upgrading their strategic orientation, urban areas are integrating the concept or resilience into their sustainable development goals. In order to meet the needs of each city, local contextualization forms a distinctive framework that enables them to resist and adapt to present and future climate challenges. Nevertheless, the recent concept of resilience includes not only the climate change issues, but broadens it to general principles of "sustainable" topics: economical, social, and environmental. The focus of this paper is on the sustainability-resilience relation in strategic orientation of cities. By examining the best practices in formulation and implementation of resilience strategies, the aim is to define how cities perceive, adjust and (re)act to current climate change issues while applying the holistic approach. The emphasis is on locally specific context, particularly Belgrade, that, in spite of facing numerous socio-economic obstacles, is trying to implement the general resilience goals and meet the sustainable demands, simultaneously showing that less developed cities have the capacities to follow the global trends.