Using Resilience Thinking and Urban Ecology Approach to Develop Strategic Environmental Assessment of Urban Development Plans

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) is a tool for considering environmental issues in the early stages of decision-making. Effective application of the SEA, particularly to urban development policies, has been globally limited by several technical and procedural constraints. One of the key shortcomings is that the set of sustainability criteria proposed by SEA, lacks a robust and transparent theoretical foundation undermining its credibility to be used by decision makers to justify their decisions. If properly integrated into the framework and process of SEA, the resilience thinking combined with the principles and theories of urban ecology can enhance the capacity of SEA to overcome the problems. Resilience thinking has been recently proposed as a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing urban environments. This research investigates the possibility of using resilience thinking and the principles and concepts of urban ecology to enhance the credibility and transparency of SEA for decision makers and proposes an integrated framework for strategic environmental assessment of urban development plans. The framework applies three steps to the assessment of urban landscapes. The first step evaluates general resilience of an urban environment. The second stage is an assessment of the effects of urban development proposals on the urban resilience evaluated through the previous step. The third stage develops an adaptive management system in order to support systematic engagement of public and stakeholders and to inform monitoring of the adverse effects. The proposed framework is expected to be further tested and validated through its application in different case studies.

Keywords:

Strategic Environmental Assessment , Resilience Thinking , Social – ecological systems , Urban Ecology