Unveiling the Concept of Spatial Resilience in Urban Design: A Systematic Qualitative Review

 In response to a wide range of challenges and problems arising from social and economic change, spatial resilience as a late theory of urban resilience is being developed and conceptualized in both theoretical and practical areas. However, the conceptual implications of spatial resilience, especially in the field of urban design, have not been clearly explainedyet and its implications in other fields have been used sparsely in the field of urban design.

Spatial resilience in many respects represents a new-multidimensional discourse approach to place-based urban resilience, where the urban system produces and reproduces adaptability and variability vis-a-vis change. This paper seeks to develop a general framework to create a resilient place based on the relationship between spatial resilience and urban design. Moreover, it aims to determine the conceptual framework for the urban spatiality of resilience.

This study examines the spatial resilience literature based on the conceptual framework of the RPA. This study performed a systematic review of spatial resilience literature in four stages by searching the term “spatial resilience” in the Scopus database from 1973 to May 2020. Finally, 14 articles were selected for content analysis.

Spatial resilience implies the place-based and local aspects of the urban system and its integration with higher scales. Intra- and inter-scale interactions and trade-offs transformability and adaptability, innovation and creativity, co-evolution, and place identity are the five influential features of spatial resilience.Beyond traditional resilience with an engineering approach, spatial resilience emphasizes the integration of resilience policies with other policies and programs that affect the nature of places and how they operate.