Exploring Urban Resilience From A Social-ecological Perspective

In the age of Anthropogenic,cities face increasingly complex environmental and social challenges,and global climate change has exacerbated the uncertainty of these challenges.At present,more and more cities are experiencing the threats of chronic pressures and acute shocks,ranging from rapid expansion of impervious surface,significant decline in the provision of ecosystem services,to extremely heat and flood disasters,and the vulnerability of most cities is unusually prominent.Despite this,contemporary cities are attracting and gathering a wide range of people,logistics,capital flows and information flows at an unprecedented rate.It can be predicted that the process of rapid urbanization will further cause more resource and environmental contradictions,which contribute to trigger profound changes in the relationship between human and nature and this trend will be irreversible.Therefore,coping with environmental risks,promoting human-land synergy,and achieving sustainable development of urban areas have become the current needs for building a better community of human destiny.Nowadays,shaping and nurturing the city's resilience potential has been seen as a long-term mechanism for governance systems to enhance human well-being and build cooperation for a win-win situation.Originated from system ecology,the theory of resilience has been revised and developed rapidly together with the continuous updating of the cognition of the operation mechanism of complex systems and the mode for achieving sustainable development.The attempt to introduce resilience into the urban system is in the ascendant.The resilience of urban systems,especially from a socio-ecological perspective,emphasizes the initiative to respond to and adapt to the impact of risks through a more flexible approach and to achieving the goal of co-evolving with risks and sustainability ultimately,which is seen to provide new ideas for urban planning,construction and governance.As an umbrella term,urban resilience has attracted widespread attention in various subjects and seen as an important academic topic and/or policy discourse.Currently,due to the complexity of urban systems and the comprehensiveness of resilience,the understanding and interpretation of urban resilience remain however quite different and unclear in academia,especially regarding its implementation approach,quantitative assessment and the operational applications.What's more,the empirical research is scarce.In order to make up for the above shortcomings and enrich the geographical perspective of urban resilience,this paper attempts to explore new ways to build adaptability for urban systems and to transform to a more sustainable trajectory through using the multi-disciplinary knowledge,multisource data,multi-domain technology and tools,under the framework of the socialecological system.Taken the central city of Shenyang as an example,this paper aims to provide information for enhancing the resilience potential of the study area and help to promote the reform toward adaptability in terms of urban planning and governance.The full text is divided into five parts,shown as follows.The first part is the research questions and research foundation,corresponding to the first and the second chapters.The first chapter mainly introduces the research background,the scientific problems to be solved,the case study area and the data and methods.The second chapter combs the theoretical basis of this research,including basic concepts,basic theories,controversy and trade-offs of urban resilience,and the current research status of urban resilience.On this basis,comments are made for the existing research to pave the way for subsequent work.The relationship between ecosystem services,green infrastructure and urban social ecological resilience are discussed in the second part,corresponding to the third and fourth chapters of the article.The third chapter firstly clarifies the social-ecological resilience mechanism of urban ecosystem services.Then,taking the specific risk of climate change as an example,the effectiveness impacts of urban ecosystem services on mitigation and adaptation to climate change are analyzed in details.Finally,the provision and dynamics of multiple ecosystem services are quantified,based on which some feasible suggestions are proposed.The fourth chapter further studies the construction of the green infrastructure network and the optimization of its connectivity for an operational tool of shaping urban social-ecological resilience,with the aim of informing planning and design practice as well as policy formulation.In the third part,quantitative evaluation of urban social ecological resilience is studied,which corresponds to the fifth chapter of the article.This section aims to quantitatively examine the overall potential of urban systems for risk reduction,crisis response and transition to sustainable development.First,the lens of urban landscape and the four agency attributes of resilience,i.e.,diversity,connectivity,decentralization and self-sufficiency are introduced;then,the connection between landscape features and resilience attributes are established,and by using landscape ecology methods and tools these features/attributes are measured.At last,several different kinds of spatial analysis method are employed to reveal the characteristics of spatial-temporal pattern and evolutionary trends of urban social-ecological resilience within the study area.We focus on the application and strategy research of urban resilience from the perspective of social ecology in the fourth part,corresponding to the sixth chapter of the article.This part first analyzes the relationship between the social ecological resilience and planning.The results show that social ecological resilience has the potential to contribute to the reform and innovation for urban/spatial planning theory and practice.Secondly,discussion regarding the adaptive governance and its impact on urban social ecological resilience is conducted.Then,the adaptive planning,which is put forward as a spatial management tool to improve urban resilience is described.Finally,under the framework of adaptive governance,it summarizes the adaptive governance strategies for the promotion of resilience potential in downtown Shenyang,combined with the analysis of the research area in the previous chapters.The conclusions and discussions are carried out in the fifth part,corresponding to the seventh chapter of the article.It sorts out the main conclusions of this paper,summarizes the research innovations and points out the shortcomings of this paper and the future research prospects.The main conclusions are summarized as follows.(1)The theory of resilience provides new ideas for urban areas to achieve a more sustainable future.(2)Urban resilience has the complexity and multi-faceted nature.(3)Social-ecological resilience links the construction of urban adaptive capacity with the dynamics of ecosystem services.(4)The insurance and optional value of ecosystem services are important to guarantee urban social ecological resilience.(5)The green infrastructure network is the material basis for shaping urban social ecological resilience.(6)Landscape is suitable to serve as the lens of the study and the carrier of the intervention for urban social ecological resilience.(7)Social ecological resilience has the potential to contribute to the reform of urban/spatial planning theory and practice.(8)Adaptive governance connects the governance practice based on ecological understanding and the social mechanism behind it,and plays an indispensable role in enhancing the social ecological resilience of cities.