Inserting rights and justice into urban resilience: a focus on everyday risk

Resilience building has become a growing policy agenda, particularlyfor urban risk management. While much of the resilience agenda has been shapedby policies and discourses from the global North, its applicability for cities of theglobal South, particularly African cities, has not been sufficiently assessed. Focusingon rights of urban citizens as the object to be made resilient, rather than physicaland ecological infrastructures, may help to address many of the root causes thatcharacterize the unacceptable risks that urban residents face on a daily basis.Linked to this idea, we discuss four entry points for grounding a rights and justiceorientation for urban resilience. First, notions of resilience must move away fromnarrow, financially oriented risk analyses. Second, opportunities must be createdfor “negotiated resilience”, to allow for attention to processes that support thesegoals, as well as for the integration of diverse interests. Third, achieving resiliencein ways that do justice to the local realities of diverse urban contexts necessitatestaking into account endogenous, locally situated processes, knowledges andnorms. And finally, urban resilience needs to be placed within the context of globalsystems, providing an opportunity for African contributions to help reimagine therole that cities might play in these global financial, political and science processes