Conclusion

How can we achieve resilience of urban areas? That is the central challenge set in this edited volume. While we don’t attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to this complex challenge, contributions in this volume focus on one of the major aspects of implementing resilience that has hitherto largely been overlooked in academic and professional debate: the role of private homeowners in contributing to urban resilience. However, homeowners’ actions toward resilience are still in its infancy and are being implemented only tardily. The potential actions have to take different types of buildings and ownerships structures into account, such as single-family housing vs. apartments; owners vs. renters, size of properties, their location, etc. As we have seen, urban resilience is not only a problem of engineering or central government, but it also incorporates both individual and systemic elements related to behavioral, financial, legal, and governance aspects of managing flood risks, in relation to different actors like homeowners.