Urban Resilience Thinking for Municipalities

This document was prepared as a contribution to the Department of Science and Technology’s (DST’s) Grand Challenge on Global Change. The DST’s three-year funded programme at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) was titled 'Urban Resilience Assessment for Sustainable Urban Development’ and was developed with the specific intention of giving support to local government in South Africa. This was done with the recognition that municipalities have a potentially vital role in proactively managing processes of change.

This report offers municipalities and their officials a set of perspectives on urban resilience, and the possibilities and limitations of applying resilience theory. Although the focus of the report is on municipalities in South Africa, it is also applicable for rural contexts. The intention of this report is to stimulate “resilience thinking” rather than to offer a simple “guide for practice” and calls on municipalities to use ideas of urban resilience in a considered and critical way.

This report presents the theory of resilience and a series of structured discussions around the themes of adaptive governance, resilient urban form, infrastructure for resilience, ecological resilience and green economies for resilience.

External report URL:

The report can be downloaded from Wits Wiredspace