BRUSSELS STUDIES INSTITUTE

The Co-Resilient City

Co-resilience is the capacity of groups and communities to thrive and connect in times of crisis. Today, we are facing multiple planetary crises (climate change, biodiversity loss, resource and fossil fuel depletion, armed conflicts, health and humanitarian crises) and we urgently need to find collective solutions and take action at various scales (local, regional, global). Co-resilience is related to collective resourcefulness and the capacity to use these resources to act together and in interdependence.

Communities across the world have started urban resilience initiatives based on collaboration and mutual support. Sometimes engaging activists and practitioners, these initiatives provide a necessary complement to the action of local and central governments, often perceived as slow and insufficient. What is the concrete contribution of these initiatives to improving city resilience? How do public authorities support them? How can their local agency be diversified and expanded across scales and levels?

The 2023 Chair’s programme will address co-resilience processes including key aspects such as Actors & Resources; Infrastructures & Tools; Organisation, Governance & Policy; Ecologies, Economies & Wellbeing and will explore ways of mapping and scenario making based on these aspects. The aim is to learn from local and global initiatives and define forms of collaboration and strategic action that can have more impact and agency at the city scale.

Prof Doina Petrescu

Doina Petrescu is Professor of Architecture and Design Activism at the University of Sheffield and Jubilee Professor 2022 at Chalmers University Gothenburg. Her research concerns issues of urban resilience in relation with urban commons, co-production, feminism, and politics of space. Her publications include Urban Commons Handbook (2022) Architecture and Resilience (2018), The Social (re)Production of Architecture (2017), Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space (2007) and Architecture and Participation (2005).

She co-founded, together with Constantin Petcou, the Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée (urbantactics.org), winner of New European Bauhaus (2022), Building4Humanity Resilience Design (2018), Innovation in Politics, category Ecology (2017), 100 projects for the Climate/COP21 (2016), Zumtobel Prize for Sustainability and Humanity (2012), Curry Stone Design Prize (2011), and the European Prize for Urban Public Space (2016 and 2010).