The hybridity of inclusive resilience

Abstract

Urban resilience strategies foster hybrid spaces across bottom-up and top-down urban governance processes for urban planning to include new ways of thinking. However, hybridity, on a more practical level, entails tensions between ways of doing things that do not conventionally operate together but are merged in the implementation of programmes, projects, and initiatives. We illustrate ‘governance’ and ‘implementation’ as different levels of urban organisational hybridity in our case study of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, empirically contrasting urban planning resilience representations against representations emerging during the implementation of its social resilience programme. We find that planning representations at the governance level imagined social resilience to be a result of organisational innovations that would form the basis of the so-called ‘Next Economy’, driven by decentralised renewable energy linked to entrepreneurial communitarian forms of organisation in partnership with public and private sectors. However, implementation reveals frustration due to institutional unfitness and the absence of business cases for attracting private investors to the table. Organisational fixes in response valorise networks of enthusiastic (but discrete and precarious) communitarian initiatives with little connection to large-scale (but centralised and only public–private) gas-free investments. By acknowledging that hybridity works differently at governance and implementation levels, we can avoid urban resilience imaginaries that pose, in practice, the burden of aligning with bureaucratic and profit-oriented logic as a new barrier to enacting inclusive citizenship.