Introduction

Dealing with climate-driven natural hazards like river or pluvial floods, droughts, heat waves or forest fires play a central role across the globe in the twenty-first century. Urban resilience has become an important term in response to climate change. Resilience describes the ability of a system to absorb shocks. Resilience depends on the vulnerability and recovery time of a system. A shock affects a system to the extent that it becomes vulnerable to the event. This book focus on the question of how to reach private property-owners to implement such measures or to improve their individual coping and adaptive capacity to respond to future events. Overall, there exist various planning, legal, financial incentives and psychological factors to encourage individuals to take an active role in natural hazard risk management with the goal to reach urban resilience. The book presents theoretical discussions and empirical cases of how to reach urban resilience. The book guides the reader through different conceptual frameworks as well as by showing how urban regions are actually trying to reach urban resilience on privately owned land. This will be shown on different cultural, socio-economic and political backgrounds to see how different institutional frameworks (formal and informal rules) have an impact.