About urban resilience in situation of chronic violence

Within the working group “Urban Resilience in situation of chronic violence” at the Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning at the MIT (Boston, MA), I have been involved2 in an international comparative research where we tried to use the concept of resilience in the urban planning field in those cities with a strong presence of violence that we called ‘chronic’. Working on empirical research conducted on the field in different cities all around the world (Napoli, Jerusalem, Medellin, San Paulo, Mexico City, etc.), we tried to define a set of testable propositions about urban resilience and also about how best to strengthen it. In this research, we tried to understand the factors that shape urban resilience within a number of cities well known for their own conditions of violence. And we have been as much interested in targeting certain spaces as "spaces of resilience" as in characterizing cities as a whole as "resilient". In our research work, rather than focusing on the root causes of urban violence or on the constraints associated with planning in situations of conflict or violence, we sought to increase our knowledge about the strategies that cities and their residents deploy to cope with high rates of (different kind of) violence. Specifically, we worked under the assumption that coping mechanisms and adaptations to violence can produce three types of resilience: positive, negative, or equilibrium resilience. That is, while some coping strategies may stem or reduce the severity of violence (positive resilience), either real or perceived, others might exacerbate the facts or perceptions of violence (negative resilience), or even do nothing at all (equilibrium resilience) to change the situation. So, after deepened our theoretical understanding of spaces in the case-studies, we turned to the concept of resilience, and we tried to examine the different spatial effects of its various trajectories. But also we focused on possible 'agents' and 'strategies of resilience' in the different cities. Among drivers of violence and potential agents of resilience, special attention has been paid to civil society, business communities, religious organizations, but also to the so called non-state armed actors as private police, gangs, and organized crime, according to the different geographical area. According with this research framework and work, the paper will present the main research findings coming from the international comparison and from an Italian case study. Then, it will focus on: 























































 1 Sapienza University, Rome, Italy – daniela.deleo@uniroma1.it 2 The URCV is an initiative jointly sponsored by MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the Center for International Studies (CIS). Its co-principal investigators are Diane Davis (DUSP) and John Tirman (CIS) and I have been involved as associated researcher since 2011. - the usefulness to think the urban matters in “terms of resilience” to better understand and deal with the spatial effects of violence within the field of urban planning; - the further uses of concept of resilience in the cases of such violent cities, an important challenge for urban planning in some Regions. In particular, by selecting two neighbourhoods for comparative study in each cities we identified how socio-economic, political, and spatial conditions affect resilience, and whether local specificity matters more than national context in making urban resilience possible. Finally, the used research strategies through the national case- studies, help us to understand which one is the possible role of planner in dealing with the mitigation of risks such as the spatial effects of chronic violence.