The importance of tackling flood risks related to climate change has been highlighted in policy-making in Taiwan due to the experiences of flooding disasters in the past and the estimated threats of flooding in the future. This chapter presents two cases in Kaohsiung to illustrate different types of spatial development: one focuses on the city centre and another on an area near the edge of the metropolitan area. It presents the characteristics of planning that are especially relevant to promote urban resilience. These characteristics are proposed according to the literature review of urban resilience related to planning and climate change. The empirical study investigates policies, government reports and research documents that were published in the past two decades and played critical roles in framing decisions to tackle flood risks. The chapter addresses the comparative analysis of local collaboration in the two cases.

This chapter aims to explore the historical roots of the concept of resilience in the context of urban planning. The simplest definition of resilience in this case is the capacity of a system to undergo change and still retain its basic function and structure after facing an external disturbance. In other words, it has the capacity to change into a different system regime without crossing a certain threshold. This basic definition has its roots in applied sciences. In engineering, for instance, resilience refers to the capacity of a structure to withstand an impact without being permanently deformed (Callister 2000) while, in ecology, resilience is defined as the amount of disturbance that an ecosystem can withstand without changing its self-organised processes and structures (Holling 1973). Resilience has been used in wide range of areas, such as ecology, environmental and social sustainability, environmental sciences, hazard planning, ecosystem management, and even in supply chain risk research.