Managing trade-offs between specific and general resilience: Insights from Canada's Metro Vancouver region

The concept of resilience has captured the imagination of urbanists and city managers. While the literature on urban and regional resilience has proliferated, our understanding of resilience trade-offs that elected municipal officials and city staff make in their daily practice remains limited. This article addresses this lacuna by examining specific and general resilience trade-offs through a case study of urban and regional planning for floods and sea-level rise in Canada's Metro Vancouver region. We identify the mechanisms that ensure the maintenance of long-term options that are essential to the development of general resilience and highlight the barriers and forces that constrain the investment in general resilience. We find that while there are many examples of nuance and depth in practitioners' deliberations about resilience trade-offs involving fiscal, equity, spatial, temporal, and design dimensions, examples of the application of a consistent transparent framework to incorporate these tradeoffs to support overall decision-making are lacking. We find that in the absence of such explicit frameworks, fiscal and political considerations tend to dominate. While there were some clear mechanisms to articulate tradeoffs leading to specific resilience gains at the municipal level, the losses to general resilience at the regional level remained somewhat unintended and implicit.

Automated summary

This article examines specific and general resilience trade-offs in urban and regional planning for floods and sea-level rise in Canada's Metro Vancouver region. It highlights the importance of mechanisms that ensure the maintenance of long-term options for the development of general resilience, and identifies the lack of a consistent transparent framework to support overall decision-making as a key challenge.