LAUSR

This introduction sets the stage for the Debates and Interventions forum on the Politics of Resilience. In recent times, “urban resilience” planning has experienced an upsurge in cities around the globe as a confident rhetoric as well as a substantive socio-physical transformation (Gressgard, 2017; Zhang and Huan, 2018). Often aligned with rhetoric around “sustainable cities,” “smart growth,” and “low-carbon development,” urban planners and politicians deploy the urban resilience imagining to supposedly absorb and adapt to potential economic, political, and socio-physical shocks of all kinds (Christopherson, Michie, & Tyler, 2009). This mix of entrepreneurial values, provision of nature, optimal socio-physical environment, and land-use regulations is marketed as nothing short of the definitive response to all sorts of city ills arising from punishing globalization, economically unstable times, climate change, natural hazards, out-ofcontrol and chaotic migratory influxes, disease outbreaks, and terrorist attacks. In pronouncements, the vision will deliver something now needed: a sturdy, robust city, built around sturdy social and physical infrastructure, that can ensure decent growth and human livability. This Debates and Interventions forum, an outgrowth of the 2017 Urban Geography Annual Lecture delivered by Sustain Fainstein, aims to de-stabilize this dominant vision of urban resilience. Each of the three essays outlines a powerful research agenda that critically aligns this vision with neoliberal political projects, generally, and state-capital alliances to re-infuse cities with economic potency, specifically. Susan Fainstein examines New York City’s recent policy initiatives developed under the resilience banner, finding this to move squarely and problematically into social and adaptive strategy. In ostensibly progressive New York, Fainstein nonetheless discovers that the tentacles of neoliberal-resilience policy have a thriving life and extend deeply into its culturalplanning fabric. Helga Leitner, taking a different tack, reveals how urban resilience is being rolled out from the top to the bottom by a network of public, private, and nonprofit sector actors that coalesce into what she provocatively calls an “urban resilience complex”. A neoliberal governance agenda in resilience guise is bolstered in the realm of conventional planning. Anne Bonds interrogates Milwaukee, Wisconsin to deftly situate urban resilience as a neoliberal project that embeds racialized and class sensibilities in its core visions, actions, and ideals. Resilience is seen to reflect and work through racial capitalism’s motifs of racialized capital accumulation, racialized