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R3C – Responsible Risk Resilience Centre
R3C is an Interdisciplinary Research Centre of Politecnico di Torino focused on urban resilience
R3C have a key role to support the delivery of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities.
R3C rethinks risk management to dynamically adapt cities to climate, social, economic and environmental challenges through an integrative and systemic approach that works across scales, sectors and dimensions.
R3C puts its transdisciplinary expertise at the service of the communities, public administrations and private enterprises while building a responsible reaction in the age of complexity.
What is resilience?
The concept of resilience has been developed in the past decades within different disciplines and understandings. In the last ten years, urban scholars and policymakers are increasingly focused on enhancing resilience in the face of climate change and other urban threats. The widespread popularity of the resilience agenda suggests that it has broad appeal and may even serve as a boundary object. However, it has also prompted criticisms that urban resilience is a fuzzy and contested term and some scholars now reject resilience altogether.
But what does resilience really mean?
Resilience is the capacity of cities and regions to deal with changes and continue to develop
From a physical and natural sciences perspective, resilience implies the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks. From a spatial perspective, resilience has something additional to and yet distinct from reworking and resistance. Resilience captures the ability of an urban system - and all its constituent socio-ecological and socio-technical networks across temporal and spatial scales - to maintain or rapidly return to desired functions in the face of a disturbance, to adapt to change, and to quickly transform systems that limit current or future adaptive capacity.
Research
Preserving Cultural Heritage
The Cluster collects projects related to the analysis, collection and classification of Italian ecclesiastical and cultural heritage while assessing the risk dimensions and defining conservation intervention and valorisation policies.
Planning the Resilient City
The Cluster collects projects related to the land use measures towards adaptive planning while defining the analytical frameworks to select intervention strategies aimed at reducing systemic vulnerabilities, forwarding urban resilience.
Measuring Urban Resilience
The Cluster collects projects related to the measure of urban resilience by the integration of sensitivity and exposure to disturbances and events, defining site-specific urban adaptation measures.
Resilient Landscapes, Quality of Ecosystems and Well-being
The Cluster collects projects related to the analysis of ecosystem performance associated with landscape values while considering the integration of quality of life as a key asset to maintain the Natural Capital.
Resilient Transition and Sustainable Energy
The Cluster collects projects related to the energy performances of buildings while determining the energetic resilience and the reconversion potential of the built-up heritage for local communities.
Education
R3C coordinates field trips, design workshops and on-site seminars for undergraduate students that are attending the School of Planning at the Politecnico di Torino.
R3C coordinates PhD Course on Resilience within the PhD Programmes of the Politecnico di Torino.
R3C coordinates a specialising master programme on method and techniques for governing resilient cities.
R3C coordinates permanent formation courses for professional categories to unleash the potential of policymakers to contribute to the design of resilient cities and regions.
