Negotiating Resilience with Hard and Soft City

"The expert-driven knowledge systems that have been dominating urban design and planning are increasingly falling short of providing sustainable solutions to the crises posed by climate change. The book Negotiating Resilience with Hard and Soft City captures the nerves of people’s knowledge that guides judgements and actions to cope with uncertainties in their everyday city lives. The book challenges the notion of a singular knowledge system in an urban ecosystem and staunchly advocates for the recognition of multiple micro-knowledge systems that cohabit and shape the city."

Dr Rajesh Tandon, Founder President, PRIADr Kaustuv Kanti Bandyopadhyay, Director, PRIA

"Negotiating Resilience with Hard and Soft City is cutting edge and is of high value for everyone who wants to gain more insight of some of the key frontiers of contemporary cities. Such a demarcation line is the book’s underlying proposition that we urgently need a better understanding of the ‘survival’ strategies of the most marginalised and poor to tackle our vast planetary challenges. In this vein the authors focus on the livelihoods and experiences of displacement of migrants and informal settlement dwellers from the global north and global south and expand urban concepts such as resilience, vulnerability, urban justice, and the ‘people as infrastructure’. The result is a timely, relevant and inspiring anthology."

Peter Gotsch, Professor in Sustainable Urban Development, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

"The book Negotiating Resilience with Hard and Soft City is a timely contribution to understanding why intangible aspects of city life, such as civil society activities and a sense of community, are as relevant as the ‘hard infrastructure’. The editors and authors of the book have extensive knowledge of how this duality affects the life of urban dwellers in the Global North and South. The book is a source of critical reflection for scholars and students of Urban Planning, Urban Geography, Urban Studies and disciplines engaged with understanding the problems of contemporary cities. It will also inform those questioning current narratives around the resilience concept, its complexity and challenges. To that knowledge, the book draws on several case studies and focuses on urban residents and the micro level, those spaces that shape the city. The different contributions show how the ‘hard city’ conditions the livelihood of urban dwellers, the ‘soft city’, and how people, in turn, cope with those imposed challenges."

Javier Martinez, Associate Professor – Coordinator of the Urban Planning and Management Specialization, Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management, University of Twente