Adaptive capacity

A new notion for my project the Dictionary of advanced ecological urbanism is adaptive capacity, a term which is closely linked to resilience. I propose, below, an abstract of the new entry:

Adaptive capacity is the ability of a system to adapt to climate changes to moderate potential damages, to take advantage of opportunities for or to cope with the consequences, and resilience is the key to enhancing adaptive capacity of these systems. It refers to the capacity of humans to deal with change in their environment by observation, learning and altering their interactions.
 As applied to cities, adaptive capacity defines the skill of a city to adapt to changing contexts such as climate change to recondition itself with minimum loss. Adaptive capacity makes cities strong, more resilient, and higher performative. Cities are to learn to live with change and uncertainty. Cities with high adaptive capacity are able to reconfigure themselves without significant declines in crucial functions.
In few words, adaptive capacity can be enhanced by: learning to live with change and uncertainty; nurturing diversity for resilience; combining different types of knowledge for learning; and creating opportunity of self-organisational.


See: Resilience, landscraping, redundancy, adaptive, retrofitting