A multi-scale and multi-dimensional framework for enhancing the resilience of urban form to climate change

•A discussion of the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of resilience•Establishing the links among resilience, adaptation, and urban form•Transformability identified as the foremost urban form resilience-enhancing characteristic•Identifying seven urban design concepts that enhance the resilience of urban form

Currently, both the planning and climate change literature highlight the concept of resilience to facilitate long-term adaptation strategies. Yet, decades before the onset of climate change science, uncertainty was dealt with in the urban planning and design literature since the latter half of the 20th century through various notions analogous to resilience. Through a review of these notions that presently remain isolated from the contemporary mainstream resilience and climate change discourses, this paper proposes an urban morphological theoretical framework that establishes theoretical and empirical links between urban form on the one hand, and climate change adaptation and resilience on the other. With urban morphology as its underpinning, the proposed theoretical framework identifies a set of variables that could potentially influence the resilience of urban form, hence, are proposed to measure its resilience to climate change. These variables underscore urban form's physical, spatial, and functional characteristics and their changes over time.