Resilience now! IWG contributes to the ARL Congress Poster Exhibition 2025

On 27 and 28 March 2025, the ARL International Working Group “Resilient Metropolitan Regions – Spatial Planning and Management for Urban Transformation” contributed to the poster exhibition at the ARL Congress “Future now! – Shaping the socio-ecological transformation” in Halle (Saale). The poster presented the working group’s focus, joint research questions and first conceptual results.

The contribution highlighted the group’s work on metropolitan regions in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, with a particular emphasis on how spatial planning can support resilience in the context of polycrises and accelerating change. Key questions addressed included suitable planning instruments and institutional conditions, main fields of action such as climate adaptation, risk management, cohesion and economic transformation, and how justice and equality can be linked to a just and resilient transformation.

The poster also outlined the main challenges for implementing resilience strategies at the metropolitan scale, including actors’ cooperation, metropolitan spatial planning, policy and financial tools, and implementation and monitoring. By bringing together scientific and practice-oriented perspectives, the working group used the congress as an opportunity to share its preliminary findings, raise awareness for resilience in metropolitan regions and connect with other researchers and practitioners working on socio-ecological transformation.