Announcement: Award-winning paper in 2008

In recent years ideas of resilience have been increasingly embedded within urban planning and design practice as attempts have been made to make the built environment and critical infrastructure more resistant to external risk from natural hazards, particularly those associated with climate change, or from new security challenges facing many cities as a result of the ongoing threat of terrorism. The rapid renaissance of central urban areas in the last decade has given ample opportunities to apply such resilient principles to the construction of new buildings or regeneration areas, facilitated by changes in building regulations and the planning system concerned with broader issues of safety and sustainability. This paper argues that the embedding of resilience into the planning, design and engineering of the built environment is about not only security and community safety concerns but also the environmental benefits that might be achieved by integrating secure and sustainable design. The authors also argue that to date there has been limited integration of security and sustainability construction principles but that significant opportunities exist in the future for such sustainable urbanism to be commonplace.