Systèmes urbains et pollution de l’air extérieur : application du concept de résilience

Abstract

Outdoor air pollution is considered as a stress that global cities must adapt to in order to avoid ever-increasing health and economic impacts. The concept of resilience, hitherto mainly applied to shocks in urban environments, can bring a new way of thinking for air quality management but no conceptual framework exists for air pollution. The purpose of this article is to propose a first reflection on the applicability of the concept of resilience to the problem of outdoor air pollution for cities, which we consider here as urban systems. Both adaptive and inherent resilience are considered to, respectively, observe resilience mechanisms of cities and characterize properties that a city must possess to be resilient to air pollution. Applying the properties of resilient socio-ecological systems to our problematic enables us to provide a first framework for reflection and to identify several examples of measures to improve the resilience of cities to outdoor air pollution, according to the different dimensions of resilience (technical, organizational, political, social and economic).

Keywords

• urban system
• resilience
• socio-ecological system
• air pollution