In general, urban resilience refers to the capacity of residents, communities, businesses, organisations and systems within a city to survive, adapt and continue to develop no matter what kinds of pressures or shocks they face. The European Commission’s (EC) Urban Agenda highlights the role of cities for economic progress and innovation. At the same time, however, the agenda warns about the social risks related to growing urban areas. These risks include social segregation and exclusion, for example, but they are also related increased diversity and social innovations in many European cities.
These transforming urban resilience issues have been highly evident especially in the European post-industrial cities, which have faced serious economic transitions in the past. European University of Cities in Post-Industrial Transition (UNIC) was established to response to the challenges that cities are facing. There are ten partner universities and city collaborators in UNIC: Bilbao (Spain), Bochum (Germany), Cork (Ireland), Erasmus (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Koç (Istanbul, Türkiye), Liège (Belgium), Oulu (Finland), Zagreb (Croatia), Lodz (Poland), and Malmö (Sweden).
UNIC aims to contribute to the resilience challenges and possibilities of Europe’s post-industrial urban centres by fostering a new generation of students. These UNIC informed students with their knowledge, innovative skills and societal consciousness are hoped to act as change-leaders, active citizens and builders of more resilient and sustainable European future. In addition to education and city engagement initiatives, the UNIC aims to develop its research program. For this the UNIC organized its first Thematic Conference 2025 in Malmö (Sweden), titled ‘Urban Resilience, Sustainability and the Future of Inclusive Post-Industrial Societies’.
The Conference was based on two thematic lines of the UNIC: Sustainability and Green Cities, and Resilience and Smart Cities. Many of the presentations at the conference integrated sustainability and resilience. This elementary connection was highly evident in climate change and water resource management topics, for example. Overall, the challenge of resilience being highly complex and systemic by nature was clearly emphasized. In this context more research on social and economic resilience was highlighted.
In addition, a tendency of path dependency of urban development activities was pointed. This calls for innovations and path-creation perspectives in resilience planning. Furthermore, contextuality was strongly stressed, i.e. there is a critical need to understand the roots of differences in different cities that are grounded on their specific industrial heritage, politics, and cultures, for example. Each city seems to form its own adaptive or transformation path based on its history, industrial structure and present possibilities. Thus, context sensitivity is highly important. In addition, measurability and analysis methods of resilience were critically discussed. Indeed, the idea resilience involves different roots and is used differently by different disciplines. This boundary object character makes it challenging to measure. However, in urban planning and strategy contexts the most important character may not be the detailed measurement, but to provide decision-makers sufficient tools for policymaking and implementation.
Involving stakeholders to resilience work by (co-)creating knowledge to support decision-making was one highlighted key theme. Questions focused on how active participation of various stakeholders could help in city revitalization. Similarly, how different methods, e.g. revitalization committees and citizen assemblies, could work in practice were discussed. These questions are critical with the inclusion of marginalized groups in city planning. Despite evident challenges, all people should be involved in the circle of ‘lifelong learning for participation’ in solving challenges in post-industrial European cities.
The conference involved also city engagement activities. The participants were ‘city challenged’, in which three cities presented their situation, and researcher presentations aimed to demonstrate what kind of answers different research approaches could provide to the challenges. These approaches were working on a systemic or more detailed level: e.g. related to ability to develop services in a human-oriented way or to overcome cultures of administrative silos. Related to the latter aspect, the participants searched for answers to the prevalent challenge of tackling siloed structures in cities by means of knowledge management and network orchestration, for example.
The conference also pointed out some research and policy gaps in resilience studies and planning. Some presentations focused on policy instruments for climate resilience, or resilience strategies in cities. The key conclusion was that very few cities have explicit or even implicit resilience strategies. For developing resilience frameworks for post-industrial cities, a clear context-sensitive approach would be needed. In addition, resilience-building calls for systems thinking to overcome silos in city organizations and governance. We heard also more detailed examples of adaptation strategies in crisis situations and risk reduction on how digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) can help in that.
To conclude, developing resilience and related strategies for European post-industrial cities seems to represent a wicked problem. This means that resilience building is a complex policy and decision-making issue that itself hinders the finding of a solution due to its uncertainties, interdependencies, and related conflicts. Indeed, urban resilience involves a series of interlinked issues and problems, none of which can be resolved in isolation. This calls for collaborative and participatory approaches in research and urban planning and governance.
Writers of this blog post are Satu Nätti, Professor of Marketing from Oulu Business School, and Jarkko Saarinen, Professor of Human Geography from the Geography Research Unit at the University of Oulu. Nätti and Saarinen participated the UNIC Thematic Conference 2025 as the representatives of the University of Oulu and FRONT Research Programme.
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.