Territorial resilience: meaning and main implications for spatial planning

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic across regions and territories has been varied in terms of health effects and lockdown procedures. The impact of the health problems combined with the pre-existing economic and social conditions in each territory has generated a very complex array of pandemic territorial dimensions. Understanding the geography of the pandemic effects is still in progress. There is a huge opportunity to look at this in depth, particularly if the study of the mobility of people is aided by new data concerning the tracking of human flows before, during and after implementation of the lockdown restrictions.

At least as far as the planning of the new programming period in Portugal is concerned, regions (planning regions), intermunicipal communities (NUTS III) and municipalities are fighting against the uncertainty of the future in the aftermath of the pandemic. There is now a new and vibrant literature on what will be the main trends of change generated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This literature covers a very large number of themes and typologies of change. From the effects on global value chains, particularly relevant to more open territories, to the reconfiguration of labour processes and commuting flows, there is a vast number of potential trends to target and anticipate in the new programming period, not ignoring a wide array of sociological effects (consumption, housing demand, public space demand and others).

However, the promising help of international literature does not eradicate the problem of the uncertainty of the aftermath. The change trends identified by this flourishing literature must be considered in the context of local conditions, and this is not an easy task. Territorial resilience is at the heart of the green and just recovery goal.

When analysing regional, intermunicipal and local strategies submitted to public hearings and participation, one word emerges as a strong common denominator. That word is 'resilience'. The use of this word is so widespread that one may ask if it is just a fashionable term. In the world of spatial planning, the dissemination of fashionable vocabulary is very common. In my view, the diffusion model of knowledge among spatial planning researchers and practitioners is a good example of this.

"The use of the word reselience is so widespread that one may ask if it is just a fashionable term"

Curiously, in Portugal, the word 'resilience' (of communities, of people and, by extension, of territories) began to be used in relation to the preventive approach to rural and forest fires, which, as is well known, had devastating and tragic effects, including resulting in deaths, in the second half of the 2010s in some Portuguese regions.

Resilience is now mentioned beyond the preparedness of local communities to tackle forest fires. Resilience is now invoked as a spatial planning reaction to pandemic issues. Low-density territories (not only in demographic terms but also in terms of entrepreneurship supply and industrial fabric) were the first to invoke resilience as a strategic priority. Its use was a direct consequence of the forest fires. However, soon, other territories, including higher-density territories, began to present resilience as a priority in their strategies for the new programming period. In these cases, resilience was the key to proactive adaptations to learning by managing pandemics.

The concept has also been reinforced through the formulation of Portugal's national programme submitted within the framework of Next Generation EU. The title of the programme is Plan for Recovery and Resilience. The resilience rhetoric has now reached the national planning stage.

However, it seems to me that the fast dissemination of the concept does not mean that it is well internalised by economic and spatial planning. There is a lot of work to do in order to build a regional and local project design capacity that is able to turn the highly invoked concept into an effective way to tackle the problems and challenges encompassed by the concept of territorial resilience.

Using, for example, the concept proposed by Brunetta et al., territorial resilience is seen 'as an emerging concept capable of aiding the decision-making process of identifying vulnerabilities and improving the transformation of socio-ecological and technological systems (SETSs)'. The main challenge of the emerging concept comes (I agree with the authors) from the trespassing (in celebration of the work of one my intellectual mentors, Albert O. Hirschman of the analytical barriers between different disciplines. Trespassing, and not only surpassing, is the point. It is also interesting to compare the pandemic-led resurgence of the resilience concept with previous conceptualisation efforts.

The definition of territorial resilience proposed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report (2019) - 'the ability of a system to absorb disturbance preserving the same functioning structure, the capacity of self-organization and adapt to stress and change' - helps us to understand that the principal challenge for spatial planning derives from the holistic approach required by the concept.

I think that is what is happening now with regard to the generalised invocation of territorial resilience in Portugal, observed in the preparation of the new programme for 2021-2027. Spatial planning systems and actors have a lot of work to do regarding

the metrics of being a resilient territory (what indicators should support the design of projects and programmes),

the selection of disciplinary approaches to make projects more robust,

the definition of the personal, institutional and local capabilities to be improved and (iv) the governance problems to solve in order to achieve effective resilience.

Sometimes, it seems that, independently of the paths we follow, the same big questions and our inability to solve them stand before us. When discussing how to turn territorial resilience into an operative approach, some of the big spatial planning challenges reappear: integration, management of interdisciplinarity, multilevel coordination and governance.

For current discussions of territorial resilience, as in so many other times, my experience as a spatial and strategic planning reflexive practitioner tells me that we should act and not be paralysed, although some key questions remain to be solved. As Bent Flyvbjerg showed us in 2001, intelligent social action requires not only 'episteme' (universal truth) or 'techné' (technical know-how), but also 'phronesis' (practical wisdom or prudence). That is a good way to end this short article.

António Manuel Figueiredo is Assistant Professor at Porto School of Economics, University of Porto (retired)  Head of Strategy and Innovation Board of Quaternaire Portugal