Resilience is a framework that drives cities’ responses to climate change, evidenced by the increasing number of resilience plans that cities have adopted. Resilience plans can offer insights on how cities conceptualize resilience. We undertake a content analysis of 38 resilience plans of US cities to understand how they define resilience, conceptualize goals and implementation strategies, involve the public in their formulation, and address equity issues. We find that equity manifests in explicit and implicit ways throughout the plans but is rarely operationalized. Cities gather many social, environmental, physical and economic goals under the term resilience, which may imply a recognition of the complexity of urban systems but renders those goals ineffective. The majority of resilience plans advocate a quick return to a previous state in the face of a disturbance, forgoing the opportunity to take on the more transformative potential of the term towards a more equitable future.

Wildfire management across different planning mechanisms remains a growing yet understudied policy challenge worldwide. California's Wildfire Resilience Plan Alignment Guide is meant to leverage collaboration among different local planning mechanisms to build wildfire resilient communities. Referring to this toolkit, we identified six themes of plan alignment opportunities among three primary local planning mechanisms: the General Plan, Hazard Mitigation Plan, and Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Building on a Wildfire Planning Effectiveness protocol and evaluation, we developed a model measuring degrees of plan alignment among these planning mechanisms. We find that overall plan alignment among the three plans is low, particularly as related to vulnerability assessments. We also find that regional, private sector, federal, state, and tribal stakeholders are inadequately involved in local planning processes. We further investigate the relationship between plan alignment evaluation, stakeholder collaboration, and each county's social vulnerability, wildfire risk, and wildfire planning effectiveness. We find that counties with higher levels of social vulnerability may experience less comprehensive stakeholder collaboration, while counties with higher wildfire planning effectiveness have better alignment in wildfire management themes. The results highlight gaps and opportunities in California's wildfire resilience planning, offering insights for more efficient and effective planning and policymaking in building wildfire-resilient communities for other fire-prone regions.

This study discusses the implications of resilience design for questions of economic and social resilience, and for equity. Resilience design proposals for California’s Bay Area, resulting from the Resilience by Design project and published in 2017, were evaluated through content analysis and interviews with design teams and plan authors. Findings from the study indicate that these proposals offer visions and strategies for large-scale infrastructural projects that rely on a land-as-ecosystem framing to adapt to extreme weather events, but that they also attempt to direct the impact of these ecological processes on surrounding social systems such as planning processes and landscape regenerations for adaptation purposes. However, findings also indicate that the design process does little to address equity beyond proposing access to those new landscapes and green infrastructure spaces, and to a much lesser degree homeownership and labor models for wealth accumulation. Ecology is consistently deployed in the data analyzed to normalize and propose socio-environmental relationships, implicating questions of equity that are often not addressed. These findings matter for urban design projects and processes that are increasingly pursued by municipalities and public agencies in an effort to secure funding and implement strategies for a climate just future.