From the Politics of Urgency to the Governance of Preparedness: A Research Agenda on Urban Vulnerability Will Medd n and Simon Marvin nn To date, little social science understanding has been developed about what it would mean to strategically build resilience in the context of such rich interdependencies between social, technical and natural worlds. We argue that shifts in strategies to deal with urban crises marks a turn from the politics of urgency, characteristic of crisis management, towards a governance of preparedness, characterised by strategies to build urban resilience. Social science needs to develop research agendas that critically engage with different understandings of resilience and the challenges of building resilience across different scales of urban governance. Introduction Blurring the Boundaries of Urban Vulnerability In recent times there has been a proliferation of multiple forms of risks, hazards and crisis and associated urban vulnerabilities that vary in their form, intensity, temporality, and spatiality. Lit- eratures on crises and crises management, in- cluding authors in this journal, have long debated what constitutes crises and what strategies should follow to manage them. Should crises be defined as sudden, discrete events, demarcated by time and space and in some way out of the ordinary, or are crises a normal part of the world we live in, inherent to the complexities of modern life and indeed, necessary for our effective evolu- tion (see discussion by Rosenthal et al. 2001). There is no resolution to this debate and increas- ingly it appears that different manifestations of crises – for example as sudden unexpected events and as longer term emerging dynamics – often come together, confusing the distinctions made between different attempts to define the specifi- cities of ‘a crisis’. The dense and complex inter- connectivities between social, natural, technological and hybrid worlds that blur the boundaries of discrete events have been well documented through different social scientific lenses (inter alia see Beck 1998; Douglas and Wildalsky 1992; Perrow 1999; Urry 2003; Van Loon 2002). In times of apparent stability the intricate interdependencies between different social, technical and natural worlds that enable urban metabolism remain largely hidden. How- ever, the disruption, destabilisation and im- mobilisation caused by crises dynamics reveal the precarious interdependencies upon which times of perceived urban stability depend (Gra- ham and Marvin 2001; Perrow 1999; Summerton 1994). Along with the blurring of boundaries between different urban crises and vulnerabilities, and between social, technical and natural worlds, are the blurring of boundaries between different geo-political spaces, that is, different places con- stituted by distinctive sets of interests. Events in one part of the globe, in one territory, can have huge implications for events elsewhere, as events such as September 11th, SARS or the Tsunami in Thailand revealed. It is exactly this interdepen- dency between different territories and across different scales of activity that is captured in the intensification and acceleration of ‘‘time-space compression’’ (Graham and Marvin 2001 p.194; Harvey 1989; Urry 2002; Virillio 2003). Distinc- tions between the urban and rural become pro- blematic while distance between apparently far- away cities collapses through the flow of crises generating events. Such is the speed at which boundaries are transgressed that the widespread disruption feared by crises events tends to gen- erate the conditions for a politics of urgency (van Loon 2002). In the politics of urgency it is the speed of being seen ‘to do something’ that is brought to the fore, not time for reflection and planning. n Center for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF), University of Salford, Cube Building, 113-115 Portland Street, Manchester, M1 6FB, UK. Email: W.Medd@salford. ac.uk nn Co-Director, Center for Sus- tainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF), University of Salford, Cube Building, 113-115 Portland Street, Manchester, M1 6FB, UK. Email: S.Marvin@- Salford.ac.uk r 2005 The Authors Journal compilation r 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA, 02148, USA Volume 13 Number 2 June 2005 44 JOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT