Just, urban transformations through resilience innovations? Comparing the policy implementation in cities of the Global South and North in the 100 Resilient Cities network

Local innovations and experimentation are highlighted for policies and practices that lead to urban transformations through spatial and temporal expansion and diffusion. However, scholars criticize that rationales for and narratives on urban innovation and experimentation frequently maintain the political and economic status quo and reproduce socially unjust urban realities. Moreover, a major research gap remains on the actual implementation of local action that strives for transformation. Empirical findings are particularly missing when it comes to comparative research on policies for urban resilience that go beyond climate adaptation. The 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), now the Resilient Cities Network, represented a transnational municipal network that financially supported the development and implementation of local resilience policies in participating cities under a broad resilience definition. Partaking cities had to identify potential external shocks and systemic stresses, i.e. present underlying problems for vulnerabilities, across a spectrum that included ecological, economic, societal and built environment spheres. Based on these perceived shocks and stresses, cities had to craft related policy actions in a resilience strategy to establish adaptation pathways for the future. Against this background, this paper asks: Have urban resilience innovations been implemented and scaled to support socially just transformations? The study examines (1) to what extent and (2) in which thematic areas 100RC cities incorporated innovations and experimentation, (3) whether temporal and spatial scaling was foreseen, (4) which rationales and narratives surround the planned policies and practices (e.g., techno-centric, socially just, challenging/ maintaining the status quo) and (5) whether and how they were implemented and potentially expanded temporally and spatially, including foreseen and actual participating actors. To explore the research question, in total 1200 actions were systematically coded in 30 of the 74 resilience strategies in cities from the Global South and Global North. The first results show that experimentation and particularly the continuation of (social) innovations only make up a small part of planned actions in the Global South and North alike (120 and 65 actions in total respectively). For this study, I will analyze these actions according to the first four research categories presented above through qualitative and discourse analysis. Subsequently, I trace their implementation through a survey on and interviews of implementing actors mentioned in the actions. Based on this analysis, I compare the results to explore emerging patterns in implementation and the role given to social justice in urban innovation and experimentation across cities in the Global South and Global North.