Urban resilience in Spanish legislative and regulatory framework

Open Access

Abstract

Urban resilience is a broadly mentioned concept that will be key for the future of urban areas. However, to implement consistent and integrated policies using resilience, an inclusive perspective of the concept needs to be embedded in the regulatory framework. Therefore, the aim of this research is to assess to which extent the transposition of the concept includes an integrated approach in the Spanish legal framework. In order to do so, this research will identify the reference framework documents, conduct a systematic data collection of the Spanish legal corpus related to the previous framework documents, identify the importance given to resilience in the legal corpus and evaluate the approach and its consistency with a comprehensive perspective. This approach comes from an urban planning sight, in order to be a tool to understand the relevance of the concept in the Spanish administration, taking this into account it does not intend to be an evaluation from a legal perspective. As the results show, resilience is mostly used to address climate change and natural hazards without including references to other aspects and, when doing so, it does it in a fragmentary manner. The documents analysed does not consider a comprehensive definition, and the existing ones do not include the possible negative trade-offs and fail to fully integrate all the aspects of resilience as a strategy for sustainable development. The final considerations provide a few guidelines to policy decision-makers.