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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.(Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929)

We live in challenging times with a heightened sense of uncertainty and constant reminders of the unpredictability of what might be lurking around the corner; be it catastrophic climate events, terrorist attacks, credit crunch, youth riots, or mass redundancies. For planners in the UK, this wider sense of unease is exacerbated by a decade of constant change and perennial attacks on the value of their professional contributions to society. Among the prescribed remedies for dealing with such a state of flux, the one that is rapidly gaining currency is “resilience”. It appears that resilience is replacing sustainability in everyday discourses in much the same way as the environment has been subsumed in the hegemonic imperatives of climate change (Davoudi, 2012). Yet, it is not quite clear what …