Misfortunes never come singly. A holistic approach to urban resilience and sustainability challenges

Making cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable is one of the main global commitments for urban development, on which the Covid-19 pandemic adds both pressure and windows of opportunity. Despite an emerging scholarship, ambiguities exist with regard to the similarities, differences and trade-offs between urban resilience, sustainability, inclusiveness and other related concepts. Our empirical research aims to broaden understanding of urban resilience - sustainability nexus and its connection with urban safety and inclusiveness. To this end, we explore the variation in the perception of urban challenges and the interplay between the hazards, shocks and stresses identified and encoded by the cities participating in the 100 Resilient Cities (100 RC) Programme. The results of a multiple correspondence analysis show that hazards and acute shocks cluster together and differentiate from chronic stresses. This allowed us to discriminate between two dimensions: urban resilience and urban sustainability; at their intersection we found different “latent” challenges that score relatively high on both dimensions and represent what we call the urban safety and inclusiveness dimension. A fertile seedbed has been created for adding to the existing literature a new representation of the relationship between urban resilience and sustainability, with forays into safety and inclusiveness as well.