Exploring regional resilience in different urban systems

Abstract

The majority of the current research on a regional scale is orientated towards individual cities and not on an urban system as a whole and this type of approach neglects the critical influences of urban systems, especially on a regional scale. This study aimed to explore regional resilience in different urban systems by incorporating both regions and nodal developments to achieve a better understanding of the interaction which takes place on different levels of urban systems. Resilience can be described as the ability to stabilise, adapt and recover from a certain shock and the resilience of an urban system can be improved through strategic policies adopted by different government spheres. Consequently, policies were examined by means of the current design process and the implementation thereof. In the empirical research, the researcher identified both a developed and developing country to explore different design processes and to investigate the implementation of international policies and frameworks. Quantitative methods were used to combine population data and concepts obtained from the literature study to illustrate different ranked size distributions. After international case studies were explored, South Africa and the Northern Cape province were assessed, and numerous concepts of the case studies were used to recommend new guidelines for policy formulation to be followed in order to maximise the development potential of an urban system on a regional scale. The study concludes with the appropriate recommendations to improve regional resilience, which would have a knock-on effect on different levels of urban systems in South Africa.