Urban resilience can be described as the ability of cities to cope with crisis situations. Considering impact and duration disasters can come about abruptly in form of shocks with little or no prior warning leading to immediate exposure or arise slowly as stress and maintain adverse effects over a longer period of time. Either way, designing measures to foster resilience requires a highly contextual and holistic approach that incorporates characteristics such as robustness, redundancy, connectivity or adaptability. The emergenCITY center was launched in 2020 at the Technical University of Darmstadt and is dedicated to research on urban resilience with special attention to the role of digital infrastructures. This paper gives an insight on the results achieved within the program area “city and society” which is one of four thematic clusters. Due to the interdisciplinary approach of emergenCITY presented research refers to a wide range of crisis scenarios that pose a possible threat to urban environments such as a long-term supra-regional blackout or that are already taking place such as the adverse effects of climate change. Case studies based on the city of Darmstadt, Germany outline how crisis communication can be established and maintained, how fallback energy supply can be provided or how water sensitive urban design can be implemented on a city scale. But research is not merely technical. Integration of measures in the urban landscape, citizen participation and general acceptance play a vital role. Because one thing is certain: resilient cities must remain livable cities.
Dr. Joachim Schulze is an architect and postdoc researcher at the department of architecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt. After his diploma in 2008 Joachim Schulze worked as a project architect and project manager in Frankfurt am Main until he started is academic career. His research focus lies on cities and an integrated approach on urban design incorporating aspects like energy efficiency, resilience and sustainability. Currently Joachim Schulze is part of the emergenCITY center an interdisciplinary research cluster dedicated to research on urban resilience.