Page 133 - Çevre Şehir İklim İngilizce - Sayı 2

Elçin Sarı - Sevim Pelin Öztürk - İmdat As

Introduction

The covid-19 pandemic caused a deep environmental and organizational crises
around the globe, which made it necessary for natural and artificial ecosystems to be
highly flexible, adaptive and resilient. In recent years, ecosystems have faced major
disruptions, and natural resources have decreased - the effects of climate crisis felt
even deeper in urban areas. Urban systems can deal with the current crises only
through improving their capacity for adaptation, flexibility and resilience. The concepts
of adaptation and resiliency emerged in the 1970s, when environmental awareness
and sustainability approaches took their roots in many fields. These approaches are
now gaining strength again. With its most general meaning, the concept of resiliency
refers to the ability of natural as well as artificial systems to preserve their existence.
These systems have the ability to adapt to new conditions in case of a crisis, disaster or
threat. The sustainability of urban areas depends largely on the capacity of resiliency
and adaptation in times of crises as they need to deliver the population employment
and quality living areas.
The cities of the future will host around 70 % of the world population, and the
increasing vulnerabilities of our age lead them to prioritize resiliency approaches in
their future plans and visions (World Bank, 2020). The increased population and the
spatial expansion of cities lead to unexpected ecological and environmental problems,
pressure on natural resources like fresh water along with other negative effects.
Urban systems are exposed to risks and disasters such as economic depression and
organizational disruptions as well as earthquakes and floods. The spatial planning
discipline tries to respond to the negative effects of new conditions by focusing on
how to create urban and regional systems which adapt to unexpected conditions and
update themselves in a sustainable manner. It is important that urban and regional
systems can adapt to conditions and restructure (Eraydin, 2016).
Flexibility-adaptation and resiliency concepts are used synonymously with the
concept of sustainability in certain cases, but in fact they are two different terms.
According to Hudson (2009), the concept of resiliency has recently offered a socio-
economic approach, redefining the relationship between society and nature based on
the concept of adaptation. Flexibility is used to mean not only the state of resiliency,
but also the ability to adapt to new conditions that will provide a relative advantage
(Alberti et al, 2003; Godschalk, 2003; Eraydın, 2013). The key elements of the
capacity for resiliency and adaptation to changing conditions are defined as recovery,
adaptability, transformability-innovativeness, self-organizing capacity, flexibility and
diversity (Eraydin, 2016).
Adaptation capacity deals with the question whether a region is prepared and well-
equipped for small as well as sudden and dramatic changes. This concept involves
many different dimensions such as environmental/ecological changes, changes in

119 Journal of Environment, Urbanization and Climate