FROM EVIDENCE TO ETHICS: MAPPING THE EPISTEMIC TERRAIN OF EMERGENT URBAN RESILIENCE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/2413-7154/2025.94.3Keywords:
emergent urban resilience, methodological challenges, war-affected cities, war, UkraineAbstract
Emergent urban resilience (EUR) develops within volatile and uneven crisis environments, where disrupted infrastructures, fragmented governance, unstable economies and shifting social practices interact in unpredictable ways. These dynamics make EUR analytically important yet empirically elusive. Evidence is often partial, rapidly outdated or entirely absent; many adaptive practices are short-lived and leave no stable trace. As a result, research tools designed for stable contexts struggle to capture how resilience takes shape during war and protracted disruption. This paper examines the conceptual, methodological and ethical challenges of studying EUR under such conditions. Drawing on a structural model of urban domains and a dynamic perspective on crisis temporalities, it shows why traditional assumptions about data, visibility and coherence do not hold. Rather than offering new methodological solutions, the paper outlines what researchers must consider when working with fragmented evidence and unstable field conditions, and highlights the interpretive and ethical responsibilities that accompany research in crisis-affected urban settings.
First received: 12 November 2025
Accepted: 11 December 2025
Published: 15 December 2025
Competing Interests
Kostyantyn MEZENTSEV:
The author is the Editor-in-Chief, therefore, they did not participate in the review and decision-making process regarding the publication of this article.
References
Ahmadivostakolaei, M., Ranjgar, B., Moghimi, A., & Izadi, M. S. (2024). A study of the impact of urban spaces on social resilience in case of natural disasters: Insights from citizens affected by March 2019 flood in Aq Qala City, Iran. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 113, 104862. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.104862
Aldrich, D. P. (2017). The Importance of Social Capital in Building Community Resilience. In W. Yan & W. Galloway (Eds), Rethinking Resilience, Adaptation and Transformation in a Time of Change (pp. 357-364). Springer International Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50171-0_23
Alexander, D. E. (2013). Resilience and disaster risk reduction: An etymological journey. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 13(11), 2707-2716. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-13-2707-2013
Basheer, M., & Elagib, N. A. (2024). Armed conflict as a catalyst for increasing flood risk. Environmental Research Letters, 19(10), 104034. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ad6fb6
Borsekova, K., Nijkamp, P., & Guevara, P. (2018). Urban resilience patterns after an external shock: An exploratory study. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 31, 381-392. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2018.05.012
Bozza, A., Asprone, D., & Manfredi, G. (2015). Developing an integrated framework to quantify resilience of urban systems against disasters. Natural Hazards, 78(3), 1729-1748. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-015-1798-3
Burayidi, M. A. (Ed.). (2020). The Routledge handbook of urban resilience. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Cariolet, J.-M., Vuillet, M., & Diab, Y. (2019). Mapping urban resilience to disasters - A review. Sustainable Cities and Society, 51, 101746. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2019.101746
Carstensen, N., Mudhar, M., & Munksgaard, F. S. (2021). ‘Let communities do their work’: The role of mutual aid and self‐help groups in the Covid‐19 pandemic response. Disasters, 45(Suppl 1), S146-S173 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12515
Clark, J. N. (2024). Resilience as a ‘concept at work’ in the war in Ukraine: Exploring its international and domestic significance. Review of International Studies, 50(4), 720-740. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210524000305
Clark-Ginsberg, A., McCaul, B., Bremaud, I., Cáceres, G., Mpanje, D., Patel, S., & Patel, R. (2020). Practitioner approaches to measuring community resilience: The analysis of the resilience of communities to disasters toolkit. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 50, 101714. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101714
Coaffee, J., & Lee, P. (2016). Urban Resilience: Planning for Risk, Crisis and Uncertainty (1st ed. 2017 edizione). Red Globe Pr.
Cutter, S. L., Barnes, L., Berry, M., Burton, C., Evans, E., Tate, E., & Webb, J. (2008). A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters.
Global Environmental Change, 18(4), 598-606. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2008.07.013
Davoudi, S., Shaw, K., Haider, L. J., Quinlan, A. E., Peterson, G. D., Wilkinson, C., Fünfgeld, H., McEvoy, D., Porter, L., & Davoudi, S. (2012). Resilience: A Bridging Concept or a Dead End? “Reframing” Resilience: Challenges for Planning Theory and Practice Interacting Traps: Resilience Assessment of a Pasture Management System in Northern Afghanistan Urban Resilience: What Does it Mean in Planning Practice? Resilience as a Useful Concept for Climate Change Adaptation? The Politics of Resilience for Planning: A Cautionary Note: Edited by Simin Davoudi and Libby Porter. Planning Theory & Practice, 13(2), 299-333. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2012.677124
DeVerteuil, G., Golubchikov, O., & Sheridan, Z. (2021). Disaster and the lived politics of the resilient city. Geoforum, 125, 78-86. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.07.004
Douglas, G., Klinenberg, E., & Koslov, L. (2018). Grassroots Relief: Informal and Community-Based Response to Extreme Weather Events from Occupy Sandy to the Cajun Navy. American Sociological Association Annual Conference.
Faulkner, L., Brown, K., & Quinn, T. (2018). Analyzing community resilience as an emergent property of dynamic social-ecological systems. Ecology and Society, 23(1). URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26799048
Fleischer, J. (2013). Time and Crisis. Public Management Review, 15(3), 313-329. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2013.769852.
Folke, C. (2006). Resilience: The emergence of a perspective for social-ecological systems analyses. Global Environmental Change, 16(3), 253-267. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.04.002
Fotaki, M. (2022). Solidarity in crisis? Community responses to refugees and forced migrants in the Greek islands. Organization, 29(2), 295-323. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084211051048
Ghaffarian, S., Kerle, N., & Filatova, T. (2018). Remote Sensing-Based Proxies for Urban Disaster Risk Management and Resilience: A Review. Remote Sensing, 10(11), 1760. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs10111760
González Castillo, O. F., Antoniucci, V., Mendieta Márquez, E., Juárez-Nájera, M., Cedeño Valdiviezo, A., & Osorno Castro, M. (Eds). (2022). Urban resilience: Methodologies, tools and evaluation: theory and practice. Springer.
Gray, S. (2023). Rethinking disaster utopia: The limits of conspicuous resilience for community-based recovery and adaptation. Disasters, 47(3), 608-629. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/disa.12567
Grijalba Castro, A. I., & Ramírez López, L. J. (2021). Sustainability and Resilience of Emerging Cities in Times of COVID-19. Sustainability, 13(16), 9480. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su13169480
Haase, D., Larondelle, N., Andersson, E., Artmann, M., Borgström, S., Breuste, J., Gomez-Baggethun, E., Gren, A., Hamstead, Z., Hansen, R., Kabisch, N., Kremer, P., Langemeyer, J., Lorance Rall, E., McPhearson, T., Pauleit, S., Qureshi, S., Schwarz, N., Voigt, A., Wurster, D., & Elmqvist, T. (2014). A quantitative review of urban ecosystem services assessment: concepts, models and implementation. AMBIO 43(4), 413-433. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-014-0504-0
Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1-23.
Jędraszczyk, K. (2025). The Language of the Witness, the Language of the Researcher: Verbal and Nonverbal Communication in “Emergency Research”. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 58(3), 49-71. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/cpcs.2025.2472571
Kaufmann, M. (2013). Emergent self-organisation in emergencies: Resilience rationales in interconnected societies. Resilience, 1(1), 53-68. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.765742
Kimhi, S., Eshel, Y., Marciano, H., & Adini, B. (2023). Impact of the war in Ukraine on resilience, protective, and vulnerability factors. Frontiers in Public Health, 11. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1053940
Klein, E., Pleines, H., Volosevych, I., Paniotto, V., Dembitskyi, S., Shapovalov, S., & Sologoub, I. (2024). Public Opinion Research in Ukraine Under Wartime Conditions (24 p.) [Application/pdf]. ETH Zurich. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3929/ETHZ-B-000675216
Koricheva, J., & Kulinskaya, E. (2019). Temporal Instability of Evidence Base: A Threat to Policy Making? Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 34(10), 895-902. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2019.05.006
Lawrence, M., Homer-Dixon, T., Janzwood, S., Rockstöm, J., Renn, O., & Donges, J. F. (2024). Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability, 7, e6. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1
Libal, K., & Kashwan, P. (2023). Solidarity in times of crisis. In Rights at Stake and the COVID-19 Pandemic. Routledge.
Libanova, E. (2025). Resilience of the Socio-Economic System of Ukraine to the Shocks Caused by the War: Specifics of Formation and Response. Demography and Social Economy, 58, 3-23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15407/dse2024.04.003
MacKinnon, D., & Derickson, K. D. (2013). From resilience to resourcefulness: A critique of resilience policy and activism. Progress in Human Geography, 37(2), 253-270. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512454775
Macrae, C. (2019). Moments of Resilience: Time, Space and the Organisation of Safety in Complex Sociotechnical Systems. In S. Wiig & B. Fahlbruch (Eds), Exploring Resilience: A Scientific Journey from Practice to Theory (pp. 15-23). Springer International Publishing. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03189-3_3
Marzot, N. (2021). The Reclaimed City. Islands of resilience in the urban archipelago. ‘Temporary Use’ and transformation in emergency conditions. Festival Dell’Architettura Magazine, 11(52-53), 133-141. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1283/fam/issn2039-0491/n52-2020/531
Meerow, S., & Newell, J. P. (2019). Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why? Urban Geography, 40(3), 309-329. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2016.1206395
Meerow, S., Newell, J. P., & Stults, M. (2016). Defining urban resilience: A review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 147, 38-49. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.11.011
Nate, S. (Ed.). (2025). Ukraine’s Journey to Recovery, Reform and Post-War Reconstruction: A Blueprint for Security, Resilience and Development. Springer Nature Switzerland. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-66434-2
Norris, F. H., Stevens, S. P., Pfefferbaum, B., Wyche, K. F., & Pfefferbaum, R. L. (2008). Community resilience as a metaphor, theory, set of capacities, and strategy for disaster readiness. American Journal of Community Psychology, 41(1-2), 127-150. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-007-9156-6
Otrishchenko, N., & Wylegała, A. (2025). Introduction to the Special Section on Emergency Response Research and Documentation in a Comparative Perspective. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 58(3), 1-8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/cpcs.2024.2315136
Oviedo, L., Seryczyńska, B., Torralba, J., Roszak, P., Del Angel, J., Vyshynska, O., Muzychuk, I., & Churpita, S. (2022). Coping and Resilience Strategies among Ukraine War Refugees. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(20), 13094. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph192013094
Pelling, M. (2010). Adaptation to Climate Change: From Resilience to Transformation. Routledge.
Pilav, A. (2012). Before the war, war, after the war: Urban imageries for urban resilience. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science, 3(1), 23-37. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13753-012-0004-4
Rabinovych, M., Brik, T., Darkovich, A., Savisko, M., Hatsko, V., Tytiuk, S., & Piddubnyi, I. (2024). Explaining Ukraine’s resilience to Russia’s invasion: The role of local governance. Governance, 37(4), 1121-1140. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.12827
Reid, R., & Botterill, L. C. (2013). The Multiple Meanings of ‘Resilience’: An Overview of the Literature: The Multiple Meanings of ‘Resilience’. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 72(1), 31-40. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8500.12009
Rickard, K., Toal, G., Bakke, K. M., & O’Loughlin, J. (2025). The challenges of surveying in war zones: Lessons from Ukraine. Journal of Peace Research, 62(6), 2128-2135. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433251321763
Rosvold, E. L. (2023). Disaster resilience in conflict-affected areas: A review of how armed conflicts impact disaster resilience. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 65, 101381. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2023.101381
Sereda, V., & Mikheieva, O. (2025). How (Not) to Study a War-Affected Society: Challenges of Knowledge Production in Ukraine and Elsewhere. Nationalities Papers, 1-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/nps.2024.56
Shah, S. A., Seker, D. Z., Rathore, M. M., Hameed, S., Ben Yahia, S., & Draheim, D. (2019). Towards Disaster Resilient Smart Cities: Can Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics Be the Game Changers? IEEE Access, 7, 91885-91903. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2928233
Soldak, M., Mezentsev, K., Batunova, Haase, A., & Haase, D. (2024). Emergent urban resilience in Ukraine: Adapting to polycrisis in times of war. Ekonomichna Ta Sotsialna Geografiya, 92, 6-13. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/2413-7154/2024.92.6-13
Sun, J.-Y., Zhou, L.-Y., Deng, J.-Y., Zhang, C.-Y., & Xing, H.-G. (2024). Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Urban Emergency Response Resilience During Public Health Crises: A Case Study of Wuhan. Sustainability, 16(20), 9091. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/su16209091
Tierney, K. (2014). The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience. Stanford University Press.
Truppa, C., Yaacoub, S., Valente, M., Celentano, G., Ragazzoni, L., & Saulnier, D. (2024). Health systems resilience in fragile and conflict-affected settings: A systematic scoping review. Conflict and Health, 18(1), 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13031-023-00560-7
Twigg, J., & Mosel, I. (2017). Emergent groups and spontaneous volunteers in urban disaster response. Environment & Urbanization, 29(2), 443-458. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247817721413
Vickery, J., Atkinson, P., Lin, L., Rubin, O., Upshur, R., Yeoh, E., Boyer, C., & Errett, N.A. (2022). Challenges to evidence-informed decision-making in the context of pandemics: qualitative study of COVID-19 policy advisor perspectives. BMJ Global Health, 7, e008268. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2021-008268
von Döhren, P., & Haase, D. (2015). Ecosystem disservices research: a review of the state of the art with a focus on cities. Ecological Indicators, 52, 490-497. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2014.12.027
Wallaschek, S. (2019). Solidarity in Europe in times of crisis. Journal of European Integration, 41(2), 257-263. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/07036337.2019.1546980
Wolbers, J., Kuipers S., & Boin, A. (2021). A systematic review of 20 years of crisis and disaster research: Trends and progress. Risks Hazards Crisis Public Policy, 12, 374-392. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/rhc3.12244
Zamora-Moncayo, E., Burgess, R. A., Fonseca, L., González-Gort, M., & Kakuma, R. (2021). Gender, mental health and resilience in armed conflict: Listening to life stories of internally displaced women in Colombia. BMJ Global Health, 6(10). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2021-005770
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Kostyantyn MEZENTSEV, Myroslava SOLDAK, Elena BATUNOVA, Dagmar HAASE, Annegret HAASE
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
The article and any related published material are available under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right to publish the article.
