Contested Spaces for Negotiated Urban Resilience in Seville

Abstract

This chapter aims to analyse collective experiences contributing to urban resilience carried out by self-organised civil society groups in Seville (Spain). We use the idea of contested spaces, embedded in the concepts of radical resilience and negotiated resilience, to analyse the case study. We argue that these practices have promoted, by contestation and negotiation, essential green infrastructure for resilience to hydro-climatic risks in the city. Indeed, these communitarian experiences appear in a context marked by a long history of top-down urban planning, in which urban resilience is traditionally understood as a target to be achieved through a robust hydraulic infrastructure system. With the effects of climate change becoming more and more present, bottom-up civil society initiatives have emerged as a form of community resilience in recent decades. We discuss the processes of transformation and hybridisation of these experiences, their conditions of development as well as the limitations of the communitarian approach related to urban resilience. Co-managementCommunity managementNegotiated resilienceRadical resilienceUrban green infrastructure