The Application of Ecological Resilience to Urban Landscapes

The understanding of resilience is a key concept for improving the adaptive capacity of cities to deal with and take benefits from unpredictable changes while keeping on evolving. However, in urbanism and architecture, a theoretical framework to use resilience in urban, landscape and architectural design is still needed. This thesis proposes an instrumental theory that can work as a link between the ecological theory of resilience and its utilisation in urban and architectural design. Through the implementation of this new knowledge, it should be possible to provide insight into the structures, dynamics and self-organizing processes that sustain the resilience capacity of cities. The research has developed a methodology for analysing the ecological resilience of urban landscapes using an urban morphological approach. The method has been tested on case studies in Auckland, New Zealand, and Tokyo, Japan, showing it is possible to observe changes in the resilience of the urban fabric.