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The world is becoming increasingly urban and cities face a constant struggle with the complex environmental, social, economic, and political challenges of the 21st century. Many international organizations have argued that cities will need to become more resilient to these challenges. However, it is not particularly clear what that really means. In practice, policies often use the concept of 'resilience' as a buzzword. In this regard, resilience principles – that is, defining specific mechanisms that make a city resilient – can help clarify the concept and its applicability. Several case studies provide examples of how such principles can be used as tools to brainstorm on new solutions, how they can be used to evaluate proposed policy options and overarching urban resilience plans, and how they can be compared to stakeholders' preferences for national policy strategies. When applied in a structured way, resilience principles provide a powerful tool to move urban resilience thinking from a metaphorical talk to meaningful solutions.

Organic farming emerged as a social movement promoting social justice and ecological sustainability within agriculture. In recent years, the organic sector has grown substantially throughout Europe. One contributing factor is strong policy support from the European Union, based on the general understanding that organic farming is conducive for sustainable development. Austria provides a relevant example of this development, both in terms of the expanding organic sector and in terms of national policy support. For this purpose, an exploratory case study in Austria was chosen as the main setting of this thesis. The concept of social-ecological resilience is found suitable as a framework to discuss sustainable agriculture in Europe since it takes the dynamics and interdependence of social and ecological systems into account. Social-ecological resilience has three defining characteristics: the amount of change a system can undergo while maintaining its functions and structures, the degree of self-organization, and the capacity for adaptation and learning. The objective of this thesis is to increase understanding of the development of organic farming by exploring the relation between the IFOAM Basic Standards of organic farming, farmers' perspectives on organic farming, and the actual development of organic farming practices. A further objective is to develop the concept of farm resilience and to analyze organic farming within a social-ecological resilience framework. Analysis of the case study shows that farmers exhibit dual perspectives on organic farming. They see it as a preferred farming practice that promotes sustainable development but also as an imposed policy that makes farmers more dependent on subsidies. The resilience analysis finds that organic farming builds farm resilience if interpreted as in the IFOAM Basic Standards, while current organic farming practice may compromise farm resilience. Thus, organic farming has the capacity to build farm resilience provided the IFOAM Basic Standards are translated into practice. This thesis concludes that shifting the focus to qualitative aspects of organic farming is paramount during the current period of expansion. Farm resilience is found to be a useful concept to analyze farming systems; it also lends itself as an analytical tool for policy development.

Although qualitative secondary analyses are conducted across the social sciences, supra-assorted analyses that involve both the re-use of existing data and the collection of new, primary data are relatively uncommon. Additionally, discussions regarding qualitative secondary analysis have tended to ignore the re-use of researchers' own data (i.e., auto-data). Thus, with this article, we aim to contribute to this discussion by providing an example of a supra-assorted analysis in which we re-used data from one of our previous studies, Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion. This earlier, longitudinal study was conducted with 104 poor lone mothers across Canada. We supplemented this dataset with data from three focus groups and 20 semi-structured interviews engaging a total of 38 lone mothers. Both studies were informed by a feminist and social inclusion lens, and recruited a diverse sample of women in three cities across the country: Vancouver, British Columbia; Toronto, Ontario; and St. John's, Newfoundland. In addition, most of the lone mothers who participated in the secondary analysis had also been involved in the original study as interviewees and/or research assistants. We conclude the article by discussing the strengths and limitations of, and lessons learned from, the secondary study's design.

Breathing, surviving, living, finding and forging our own meaning, acting in our own lives, finding our way to live through each day is survival, is resistance, is resilience, is re-whatever you want it to be because it is yours.
And, with every act of resisting, we become more resilient and, in time, and we find ourselves connecting with others similarly engaged: struggling, learning and sharing experiences with each other as equals. So, our individual resistance-resilience becomes, naturally, organically, messily, something of a collective survival too.

Resilience is turning out to be a resilient concept. First proposed way back in the 1970s in the context of ecosystem dynamics, it was then dissected and elaborated–spawning terms such as malleability, elasticity, hysterisis, inertia, resistance, amplitude–as ecologists struggled to make it into something measurable, usable, and distinct from its notoriously slippery predecessor 'stability'.

In recent times, research that has traditionally concerned itself with children 'at risk' has been supplemented by studies which have concentrated on the characteristics of those children who display resilient behaviours despite the presence of negative individual, family or environmental factors. A range of internal and external 'protective factors' that contribute to childhood resilience has been identified in the literature.The research being presented here reports on one phase of a longitudinal study that is tracking children originally identified as displaying resilient or non-resilient behaviour. After one year, the persistence of resilient or non-resilient behaviours is noted among the 55 children in the study; the incidence of changed behaviour – either from resilience to non-resilience or vice versa – is low. Case studies of three children are used to illustrate the trends in the findings and to provide real examples of how the presence or absence of protective factors impact on the lives of real children.

Anatomy of the resilience machine / Simin Davoudi, Jennifer Lawrence and James Bohland -- Securing the imagination : the politics of the resilient self / Julian Reid -- Designing 'smart' bodies : molecular manipulation as a resilience-building strategy / Rebecca J. Hester -- Organising community resilience / Christopher Zebrowski and Daniel Sage -- Rejecting and recreating resilience after disaster / Raven Cretney -- The resonance and possibilities of community resilience / Lauren Rickards, Martin Mulligan, and Wendy Steele -- Adaptation machines, or the biopolitics of adaptation / Kevin Grove and Jonathan Pugh -- The resilient city : where do we go from here? / Peter Rogers -- Towards a critical political geography of resilience machines in urban planning / Thilo Lang -- Resilience and justice : planning for New York City / Susan S. Fainstein -- Seeking the good (enough) city / Brendan Gleeson -- Dismantling the resilience machine as a restoration engine / Timothy W. Luke