Beyond Resilience: Are the Cities Ready for Collapses

(Paperback)

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The focus of this book has been concentrated on a criticism of the current resilience strategies: how adapting an anachronistic model simply perpetuates its obsolescence, and despite generating temporary improvements, it does not offer us in its reformist vision a real solution to the problems that we will have to face.

The focus of this book has been concentrated on current resilience strategies, a useful concept to understand and act in a complex, global world with signs of imbalances in the urban models that came from the past, but that has become a wildcard easy to use.

The increasing impossibility of encrypting the term resilience, of approaching it from more reliable scientific principles, leads us to a conceptual drift that this book echoes. Far from understanding and preparing for a system change, resilient thinking is presented on many occasions as a survival table that facilitates the permanence of the established model, promoting small strategic modifications to a trust in a system that is increasingly compromised.

Author Bio

Willy Mller is a Spanish-Argentinian architect and urbanist, with a PhD at the Universit degli Studi di Genova -UNIGE. He is one of the founders of IAAC - Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, where he created the Urban Sciences Lab. Inside the institute, he also co-directs the Spanish master MOeC - Maestra Online en Ciudades, as well as leads the X-Urban Design Studio of MAA since 2003. He is the co-author of several books, such as Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture, Media House Project, Hipercatalunya, and Occupying Structures, the last one being a monograph on his own work. Since 1996 he runs his own firm WMA - Willy Muller Architects, which has won several prizes in national and international competitions, including the first prize for an Urban Resort in St. Petersburg, Russia, the first prize in the International Competition for Cargadero Puerto de Almeria, and the first prize in the restricted competition for the New Flower Market in Mercabarna, project that in 2010 received the International Real Estate Award in London for the best public services building in Europe.