The 4th Workshop on Adaptation Research in Social Sciences: Implementer, Networker, Governance Facilitator? challenges and conceptual frameworks of social sciences in interdisciplinary climate adaptation research 1 URBAN RESILIENCE, PLANNING AND GOVERNANCE IN ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS Lu, Pei-Wen 1 ABSTRACT The notions of urban resilience and the resilient city have gained considerable attention and interest over recent years, not only in relation to environmental management but also in terms of urban risk and disaster planning (Dudley, 2010). The notion of urban resilience is not just confined to academic discourses – it is increasingly prevalent in urban policy documents across the globe. This paper examines awareness and understanding of urban resilience in the planning policy arena in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, where planning has a long history managing risks related to water. Specific attention in the paper is paid to the issue of climate change and how planning processes in the city consider or deal with the risks that it presents. The ways in which the city assesses and prepares for these risks or threats form the two main areas of analysis. The paper concludes that evidence of resilient thinking can be found at all levels of decision making in Rotterdam, ranging from national to local levels. However, the notion of resilience is still quite fuzzy and does not necessarily feature as an explicit principle for policy-making. Keywords: flood, multiple levels of governance, spatial planning, Rotterdam (The Netherlands), urban resilience 1. INTRODUCTION Climate awareness has been arisen in spatial planning due to the increasing amounts of extreme-weather disasters happened in last decades. It leads to the rising attentions for some concepts like mitigation, adaptation, and urban resilience. The approaches are not only expected to prevent but deal with physical disturbances and socioeconomic loss in urban-regions. In The Netherlands, coastal regions generate about 65% of GNP (Commissie, 2008) but heavily threatened by uncertain risks. Flood risk is one of the uncertainties nearby. However, to what extend planning systems consider and react risks from climate impacts? Whether and how relevant concepts work in planning decision-making process? Similar questions result from the fragmental understandings and the lack of evaluable assessment for knowledge formation and communication. Currently, resilience concept is often used and overlapped with other concepts (e.g. sustainable development, adaptability). Planners and decision-makers make use of concept of resilience with their own sketchy and variable * Ph. D. Candidate, Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands Peiwen.Lu@tudelft.nl