The cities must face a growth that needs to broaden its focus to be able to absorb the population cyclone that is coming. We are facing a new urban era: “The globalized world is urbanizing, the city is dispersing, citizens are fragmenting. Social, economic, technological and cultural processes are global. But urban planning is local” (J. Borja, Resilient Cities).
The correct development of cities that face these challenges involves weaving resilient urban systems based on complexity-diversity. Cities are the places where progressive and cosmopolitan alternatives are sustained. Resilience advocates intertwining the different public-private-community agents, the relationship of the agents with the space, and making the system more complex as a way to make it mature. Cities must be understood as porous (W. Benjamin), as spaces for the exchange of ideas, cultures, people and objects that intermingle spinning a dense network that interacts and is horizontally interconnected between cities, between centers and peripheries, between the urban and non-urban.
We must find a way to capture the urban beyond how many people live in cities, beyond cities as a unit of urbanity. “Urban is not static, quite the contrary. It is a dynamic, multi-scale process with different struggles and disputed spaces” (Brenner and Schmid, 2014). The theory of resilient cities is applicable to the different magnitudes of the systems that make up urban planning, going from areas such as the community, to the neighborhood, district, city or region in what is called Panarchy. Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature and of humans, as well as combined human-natural systems, are interrelated in cycles of continuous adaptive growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal (Paul Émile de Puydt) .
Panarchy system at different scales (source Extremadura 2030)< /p>
Shaping cities under the theories of resilience, panarchy, and the right to the city, urban planning is understood from a complex system approach , and that it must become more complex as a way to mature. Urban resilience should be an approach as a way to “rescue the citizen as the main element, protagonist of the city that he himself has built” (H. Lefebvre).