The activities in this book were developed from systems thinking frameworks or adapted/enhanced from existing activities to better suit the purpose of applying systems thinking frameworks to resilience planning in three phases: Problem Diagnosis, Stakeholder Engagement, and Action Planning.

Resilience of systems can be defined as the ability of the system to “persist and survive amidst a variable environment” (Meadows 2008, p. 76). In the context of cities, resilience can refer to the ability of the city to sustain operations that promote quality of life for its stakeholders amidst disturbances or hazards. Resilience does not necessarily mean that the city is able to “bounce back” to some pre-hazard state, particularly if that baseline state was sub-optimal to begin with. Rather, it means that the city is able to adjust and adapt to changing conditions in order to function optimally. Thus, actions to develop resilience can and should be proactive as well as reactive. Such proactive transformation requires careful and deliberate planning.

The activities in this book were developed from systems thinking frameworks or adapted/enhanced from existing activities to better suit the purpose of applying systems thinking frameworks to resilience planning in three phases: Problem Diagnosis, Stakeholder Engagement, and Action Planning.