Exploring urban resilience thinking for its application in urban planning: a review of literature

Environmental and urban problems are rooted in both ecology and urbanism contexts. The main issue in this regard is to plan, design and manage urban settlements where human beings would be able to have the desirable quality of life according to sustainable principles. The increase in social, economic and spatial vulnerabilities in cities, and the excess of degradation factors of natural environment resources show the necessity of considering resilience thinking. This paper aims to apply resilience thinking to urban studies and to identify the required basis for further research on urban resilience through a descriptive analytical review of the theoretical literature. A recent research on urban resilience in urbanization, which is a novel topic in urban resilience studies is addressed in this article. This paper aimed at introducing indices of urban resilience through a particular approach to the relationship between urban form and urban resilience. Given the literature review of urban resilience, our results show that while most research topics rely on environmental dimensions and reduction in natural hazards, such as global warming and climate change, the need for further research on spatial morphology and urban spatial structures is evident. Furthermore, additional research is needed to explore the criteria of urban resilience measurement specifically in the locational-spatial aspect.