Citizens living in cities where public entities are committed to the development of city resilience are increasingly
aware that the entire responsibility for preventing, responding to and recovering from crises cannot fully fall on
public entities and private companies. In fact, citizens are more and more required to prepare for, respond to and
recover from crises. To that end, there is an emerging need to involve not only public entities and private
companies but also citizens in the process of building a city’s resilience in order to understand the different
perspectives on the same reality. This research paper is based on a systematic literature review to develop a
framework that defines and describes the successful characteristics of public-private-people partnerships (4Ps) in
the city resilience-building process. The framework revolves around two criteria for classification: the dimension
of the characteristics (stakeholder relationship, information flow and conflict resolution), and the attributes of
the partnership. A preliminary list of relationships among the characteristics found in the literature is also
presented. The aim throughout is to define which characteristics need to be developed in order to better ensure
successful cooperation among the three main stakeholders: public entities, private companies and citizens