“Daily Resilience”: Sustainable Strategies for Urban Fringe in Three Medium-sized Inner Spanish Cities

Abstract

Urban resilience has evolved in the last time into a wider scope, related to managing the complexity of urban systems and their “metabolism”, looking for more sustainable strategies. This paper aims to set a concept of “daily resilience” as a specific and essential strategy for medium-sized cities, through the historical analysis along the last five decades of three medium-sized inner Spanish cities: Vitoria, Zaragoza and Valladolid, which represent the transition from an expansive model, in particular in their respective urban fringe, to the “urban resilience agenda”. After a cycle of expansive growth, several Spanish cities have been adopting tailored strategies trying to develop a new vision of their respective urban fringe, where the urban development tensions concentrate. These strategies consist of composing an own profile of action, learning from the history of the city itself and from the natural values of their surrounding territory. This paper concludes that this idea of recovering local identity seems to be resilient, and reveals that in these three cities appear new tools (green infrastructure, urban regeneration and territorial planning) which found a useful topic to articulate a new integrated strategy for the “metabolism” of urban fringe in water systems.