Wheeling Out Urban Resilience: Philanthrocapitalism, Marketization, and Local Practice

In this article, we examine how urban resilience has emerged as a global urban policy project, offering solutions for cities about how they can adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses, particularly those associated with climate change. We conceptualize this as a multicentric global urban resilience complex, catalyzed until recently by the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative in concert with the World Bank. The complex is comprised of three components: (1) a global network of foundations, multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private-sector goods and services providers, wielding differential power and influence; (2) measurement and assessment devices that both mobilize and define resilience; and (3) initiatives to marketize urban resilience as producing a dividend also for private-sector firms and investors. Northern institutions define what should be done, downscaling this as a sequence of practices, participatory agenda setting, strategizing, and implementation to be followed by cities. Examining how the complex has come to ground in Semarang and Jakarta, Indonesia, we identify ways in which it is reproduced but also criticized and contested. If the complex in many ways is driven by philanthrocapitalist and neoliberal norms and aspirations, its programs also are subject to critique and contestations at the local scale.