Confronting Climate Change, Building Resilient Cities and Public Spaces

Over the last decades, urban life has been indelibly influenced by climate change. Recently, significant efforts have been made to mitigate consumption of carbon and other contributors to climate change. But today many cities around the world are confronting this issue. Climate change affects all cities with a combination of extreme weather events and chronic conditions. In our country, Iran, it also has had different devastating consequences on urban physical structures and people’s everyday life. Therefore, in recent years, particularly drought has become prominent in environmental and urban policies as well as national political debates, in a manner unprecedented in the last century. However, Iranians, as an ancient civilized nation, have always faced this issue and have yielded innovative achievements such as vernacular architecture and aqueducts (Ghanat) during the history. In this paper it is highlighted that although cities are considered as major contributors to climate change, they also play a key role in mitigating this problem as well as adapting to its outcomes in future. Thus, after reviewing resiliency and its diverse descriptions we will discuss why we should care about resilient cities and public spaces and the role of urban design in resiliency of our cities. Finally, several urban design strategies for greater resilience or building resilient cities and public spaces are proposed.