Resilience and the Sustainable Development Goals: a scrutiny of urban strategies in the 100 Resilient Cities initiative

In the last decades, discourse and practice on urban transformation have centered around the concepts of sustainability and resilience. However, resilience in a narrow understanding–i.e. protecting the status quo–can contradict sustainable development. The 100 Resilient Cities exemplify a network in which cities actively pursued adaptation to future challenges in a way that could link resilience and sustainability. In this article, we analyze the resilience strategies of cities in this network against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to understand the extent to which they consider sustainable development simultaneously. Overall, we find a positive trend towards resilience and sustainable development in urban strategies, particularly in the Global South. However, cities’ resilience efforts often prioritize economic goals over social and environmental objectives. This contrasts with the call for transformative actions to achieve the SDGs.