Post-COVID recovery and renewal through whole-of-society resilience in cities

This paper explores and extends understanding of the role and significance of whole-of-society resilience programmes that support cities when dealing with complex crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Highlighting the complexity of whole-of-society resilience as different actors locally shape it, we ask the question: How can collaboration between formal and informal resilience practices help to enhance resilience across the ‘whole-of-society’? We answer this question by reviewing the importance of whole-of-society resilience and its complexity in a city’s governance of the COVID-19 crisis. We argue that the necessity of renewing approaches to building local resilience capabilities across the whole-of-society requires synchronisation across and between formal and informal approaches – that is, “bottom-up” and governmental initiatives – to meet the diverse needs of communities. Secondly, we detail two recent practice-orientated initiatives that have taken a renewal approach to building resilience through the involvement of whole-of-society in planning recovery from COVID-19 using international standard ISO/TS 22393; and a new initiative called the National Consortium for Societal Resilience [UK+]. Finally, we signpost a set of critical questions for whole-of-society resilience practice.