Methods to Integrate Considerations on Culture, Ethics and Citizen Acceptance Into Urban Planning for Resilience Enhancing and Vulnerability Reduction

This paper presents selected relevant research results from the EU FP7 project VITRUV (“Vulnerability Identification Tools for Resilience Enhancements of Urban Environments”), relating to methods to integrate consideration on culture and ethics aspects, including citizen acceptance, into conceptual urban planning. While security aspects do not always figure prominently in urban planning, much of that planning has effects on citizens’ security. Security aspects obviously have an influence on how built environment is changed and developed. Conversely, the way in which built environment is changed and developed influences the security of infrastructures and society as a whole, both in manifest and in latent ways. Putting one focus on ‘soft’, such as cultural, aspects in urban planning, related parts of VITRUV will help urban planners identify how their planning decisions may directly or indirectly affect societal security. In this context, security means a high level of safeguard for the infrastructure, the supply of goods and services as well as for the commonly acquired values of a community. By identifying and validating practical methods to integrate social and cultural aspects in an urban planning tool, project results will facilitate the consideration of the multiple dimensions of threats and vulnerabilities in their context of urban planning. This among other things includes appropriate addressing of gaps between ‘factual’ security and citizens’ ‘felt’ security