Detecting the intellectual pathway of resilience thinking in urban and regional studies: A critical reflection on resilience literature

Xin Mai and Roger C. K. Chan

Growth and Change, 2020, vol. 51, issue 3, 876-889

Abstract: Confronted with increasing natural and anthropogenic crises, sustainable urban and regional development requires a sound understanding of how cities and regions respond to those crises and how that response shapes their continued development. The conceptual ambiguity and missing link among varied perspectives of resilience studies have given rise to a sneaking suspicion about the contribution of resilience thinking. By conducting a network analysis of 1,274 papers published between 1991 and 2019 using CiteSpace, we detect and visualize the intellectual pathway of resilience thinking and argue for its malleability to deepen our understanding about human‐environment dynamics. Three major research clusters were identified: adaptive capacity of ecosystems, regional variation in economic resilience, and social resilience of disadvantaged communities. Resistance and recovery of systems are the key concerns in the first two clusters, whereas social resilience emphasizes opportunities and processes of restructuring rather than returning to the pre‐crisis status. The extension of resilience thinking to the social realm is a promising area for future research. It calls for a shift of epistemology from the deterministic structure‐function hypothesis which is place‐less toward a situated understanding of context, relation, and human adaptation despite the methodological challenges ahead.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/grow.12390

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:growch:v:51:y:2020:i:3:p:876-889

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0017-4815

Access Statistics for this article

Growth and Change is currently edited by Dan Rickman and Barney Warf

More articles in Growth and Change from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().