Jon Coaffee

University of Warwick · Department of Politics & International Studies

Over recent years, and as a result of the recent global health pandemic, resilience has become increasingly central to contemporary policy discourses in urban planning and development in both the Global North and Global South. Drawing from ongoing empirical studies of community resilience and everyday practices that have been co-designed and co-pro...

Purpose Disasters continue to be most prevalent and severe for marginalised communities. To reach those furthest behind first, as the global community pledges in the 2030 Agenda, a critical assessment of equity in disaster risk governance is necessary. Yet, the understanding of factors that mediate the capacity of the governance processes to achiev...

Resilience narratives have gathered increased attention in city-regional planning over the last two decades, emphasizing holistic foresight, long-term strategic visioning, cross-sectoral integration and collaborative modes of planning. Combining such resilience narratives with the established idea of socio-spatial imaginaries, we introduce the nove...

In recent years, public spaces such as shopping centres, markets, places of worship, public transport and entertainment venues have become the target of terrorist attacks across Europe. Drafted with the involvement of by a broad range of experts from the Commission, academia and security experts, this handbook introduces the concept of security by...

Citizen generated data can play an important role in enhancing community resilience. However, the relationship between data and community resilience has only been partly addressed in existing resilience scholarship, predominantly from the perspective of data utilisation in response to unfolding crises. Yet, in this study we attempt to highlight a d...

The term ‘smart city’ has become synonymous with a technologically cultivated utopia, where urban problems can be solved computationally. This approach to urban development has been promoted as a method of enabling city administrations to become more proactive when dealing with issues including pollution, traffic flow and congestion, public safety,...

Employing an institutionalist approach to governance, and engaging with recent scholarship on organisational resilience and scalar politics, this paper focuses upon institutional reactions to terrorism in London between 1990 and 2020 and explores the mechanisms through which responses to disruption occurred. Empirically, this applied paper tracks s...

This article investigates the role of digital technologies and data innovations, such as big data and citizen-generated data, to enable transformations to sustainability. We reviewed recent literature in this area and identified that the most prevailing assumption of work is related to the capacity of data to inform decision-making and support tran...

This chapter focuses upon the potential of co-production in research linked to risk and resilience. Specifically, it proposes the need to see resilience practice as co-production and illustrates the argument with reflections from the Waterproofing Data project, which investigated water-related risks, with a focus on social and cultural aspects of d...

This chapter argues that surviving and thriving in the age of climate change is going to require more than mere protection and coping mechanisms. It will demand that we are bold and innovative, and that we embrace uncertainty and commit to transformation. The extreme risk of climate change has led to various mitigation and adaptation measures that...

This chapter discusses disaster resilience. Recent major disasters and serious disruptions have put increased emphasis on how quickly an area can recover following a large-scale shock and have meant that disaster risk reduction or disaster resilience has grown in prominence. When we look at how to interpret the great transition from risk towards re...

This chapter illuminates how the practices underpinning economic and financial resilience have progressed since the early 2000s crash. It draws on a series of vignettes from private- and public-sector organisations. From there, the chapter charts a journey from a conservative approach, which sought continuity and promoted ‘business as usual’ follow...

This chapter explores resilience in international security. The concepts and practices of resilience have become a staple of international security discussions over recent years and are now firmly embedded within numerous government documents, replacing, and updating policy ideas based on risk. As in many policy arenas where it has taken hold, in r...

This chapter focuses on futureproofing in the twenty-first century. Here, resilience is employed everywhere in the Western world as the futureproofing strategy of choice. In the light of 9/11, it became necessary to articulate how we manage and govern risk given that ‘we live, think and act in concepts that are historically obsolete but which nonet...

This chapter discusses responsive critical infrastructure lifelines. Here, the complex interconnectedness of infrastructures, governance, economic growth, and social need gives rise to risk. In response, the drive for resilient infrastructure requiring redundancy, diversity of approach, and more than just a ‘Plan A’, underpins the maintenance of se...

This chapter tells the story of how ideas of resilience emerged as the go-to futureproofing idea in the early years of the twenty-first century. It has a long history dating back to pre-modern times and extends through the advancement of associated ideas of ‘risk’. Tracing the deeper development of changes in the way hazards and disasters have been...

Catastrophic events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Tohoku ‘Triple Disaster’ of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that hit the eastern seaboard of Japan in 2012 are seen as surprises that have a low probability of occurring but have a debilitating impact when they do. In this eye-opening journey through modern and ancient risk mana...

This chapter looks at how the twenty-first century is progressively seeing a turn away from conventional approaches to risk and towards resilience. Despite being very different concepts, both risk and resilience are closely associated with a deep engagement with uncertainty and can be put into operation alongside each other. The management of risk...

This chapter asserts that, by drawing together learning points and key principles from private- and public-sector attempts to embed flexibility, agility, and adaptability into the everyday practices of organisations, it is possible to illuminate a set of key attributes required for putting organisational resilience into future practice effectively....

Over the past decade the concept of ‘resilience' – broadly viewed as the capacity to plan, prepare, respond and recover from shocks or disturbances - has gained increasing attention within urban planning literature. Yet there remains ongoing debate around how this concept can be operationalised within planning policy and practice. This paper presen...

There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures deve...

There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for goal-led alignment of stakeholders and evidence-based decision-making, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as a techno-managerial framework that measures deve...

There is much discussion regarding the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) capacity to promote inclusive development. While some argue that they represent an opportunity for collaborative goal-led and evidence-based governance, other voices express concerns as they perceive them as techno-managerial framework, that measures development according...

Urban Resilience has recently emerged as a systematic approach to urban sustainability. The malleable definition of resilience has rendered its operationalisation an intriguing task for contemporary cities trying to address their organisational problems and confront uncertainty in a holistic manner. In this article we investigate the implementation...

Resilience has risen rapidly over the last decade to become one of the key terms in international policy and academic discussions associated with civil contingencies and crisis management. As government and institutions confront threats like environmental hazards, technological accidents, climate change, and terrorist attacks, they recognize that r...

Over the past decade the concept of 'resilience' - broadly viewed as the capacity to plan, prepare, respond and recover from shocks or disturbances - has gained increasing attention within urban planning literature. Yet there remains ongoing debate around how this concept can be operationalised within planning policy and practice. This paper presen...

Regulatory agencies have long adopted a three‐tier framework for risk assessment. We build on this structure to propose a tiered approach for resilience assessment that can be integrated into the existing regulatory processes. Comprehensive approaches to assessing resilience at appropriate and operational scales, reconciling analytical complexity a...

Regulatory agencies have long adopted a three-tier framework for risk assessment. We build on this structure to propose a tiered approach for resilience assessment that can be integrated into the existing regulatory processes. Comprehensive approaches to assessing resilience at appropriate and operational scales, reconciling analytical complexity a...

Urban Resilience has recently emerged as both a conceptual approach and directive agenda in the attempt to enhance the capabilities of cities to withstand and manage their environmental, economic or social pressures more effectively. As a result, resilience policies are increasingly being espoused by cities around the world as an instrument to deal...

Over the past decade the concept of ‘resilience' – broadly viewed as the capacity to plan, prepare, respond and recover from shocks or disturbances - has gained increasing attention within urban planning literature. Yet there remains ongoing debate around how this concept can be operationalised within planning policy and practice. This paper presen...

The discourse of resilience has increasingly been utilised to advance the political prioritisation of enhanced security and to extend the performance of risk management in the Anthropocene. This has been notably advanced through integrated approaches that engage with uncertainty, complexity and volatility in order to survive and thrive in the futur...

Resilience is increasingly discussed as a key concept across many fields of international policymaking from sustainable development and climate change, insecurity, conflict and terrorism to urban and rural planning, international aid provision and the prevention of and responses to natural and man-made disasters. Edited by leading academic authorit...

The discourse of resilience has increasingly been utilised to advance the political prioritisation of enhanced security and to extend the performance of risk management in the Anthropocene. This has been notably advanced through integrated approaches that engage with uncertainty, complexity and volatility in order to survive and thrive in the futur...

Purpose – Resilience is a topical concept in many academic disciplines world-wide and also among practitioners. In Europe, however, the current conceptualisations of urban resilience are highly specific to institutional contexts, national cultures and traditions and emergent risks faced in particular countries and their urban areas. The differences...

The concept of resilience has become increasingly important to our understanding of contemporary planning policy and practice. Resilience offers a new and increasingly relevant set of ideas, tools and approaches to help understand the complexities of an increasingly urbanised world and in the provision of safety and security of communities against...

Existing approaches to delivering infrastructure are repeatedly criticised for returning poor value for money to the taxpayer and being too narrow to capture the wide range of benefits infrastructure provides to the economy, society and environment. Austerity provides a further stimulus to innovate new ways of delivering, funding, valuing and manag...

This article illuminates how, since 9/11, security policy has gradually become more central to a range of resilience discourses and practices. As this process draws a wider range of security infrastructures, organizations and approaches into the enactment of resilience, security practices are enabled through more palatable and legitimizing discours...

Recent disasters such as Super Storm Sandy, the Haitian Earthquake and extensive floods across the United Kingdom have highlighted the fragility of cities to a range of hazards and threats thus emphasizing the increasing importance of resilience and disaster risk reduction (DRR) in relation to the management of the built environment. While this mak...

In recent years a vast academic literature has developed around the concept of ‘militarising’ or ‘securitising’ cities and in particular the policy responses to the occurrence of crime, fear of crime and the evaluation of cities as strategic sites for a spectrum of large-scale increasingly destructive perturbations in everyday urban life, such as r...

The purpose of Deliverable 2.3 is to report on the development of an Integrated Security and Resilience (ISR) framework.

Drawing on, and integrating, emerging theories and practices of urban resilience, this article charts the emergence and progression of different ‘waves’ of resilience policy in the UK. Specifically, it argues that changing practices of resilience have emerged both as a function of time, and in relation to a range of changing socio-political and eco...

The urban environment is becoming more and more complex, not least with regard to security aspects following a decade of continuous threats to cities and their supporting infrastructures. A comprehensive and holistic (systematic) approach to improve the resilience of large scale development against attacks and disruptions has not been developed tho...

Resilience is a concept incorporating a vast range of contemporary risks and over recent years has become increasingly important to our understanding of contemporary planning policy and practice. This paper examines the changing nature of resilience strategies since 2000 and highlights how planners increasingly are asked to contribute to this agend...

This paper examines the wider social impacts of hosting the London 2012 Olympic Games and its 'legacy' ambitions in East London, emphasizing securitization as an inbuilt feature of the urban regeneration project. Drawing on extensive original empirical research, the paper analyses the modalities of Olympic safety and security practices within the O...