The realisation that issues such as climate change are irreversible gives resilience a new prominence in the sustainability debate. Rather than developing structures that try to alter disruptive factors, we must focus on those that can adapt to disruptions themselves. Resilience, therefore, is the ability of a system to respond to crises and disruptions while renewing itself without undergoing fundamental changes (P. Newman, 2009: Resilient Cities).
Resilient systems require redundancies in their structural and technical setups; they cannot simply be efficient. In fact, technical solutions alone may prove counterproductive. Additionally, the focus is shifting from the building itself to open spaces and the threshold between indoor and outdoor environments.
It is foreseeable that buildings and open spaces will need to respond to changing and, in some cases, uncontrollable conditions in the medium term. Summer heat protection will become more critical than winter insulation, which currently remains a priority in construction. Heatwaves and extreme weather events will require adaptive measures at both property and city levels. The behaviour of occupants will also play a more significant role than is currently assumed in today’s building design.
These systemic considerations are highly complex. Computer-aided modelling of outdoor conditions and changes, such as demographic shifts, can highlight what building systems need to respond to and how they can remain resilient over the long term.
