When socially constructed realities meet real world constructions: Does resilience shape urban infrastructure policies for navigating complexity and uncertainty?

Resilience has emerged as one of the dominant concepts for tackling complexity in regard to uncertain events. In the light of disruptions - extreme weather events or cyber-attacks - and global crises - the on-going COVID-19 pandemic or climate change - policy actors are increasingly under pressure to develop resilient systems. Such systems are seen by resilience theory as absorbing sudden disruptions through their capacity to experience shocks while retaining essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks. Whereas the concept has gained momentum since the 1970s, a concise translation into policy practice is lacking - leaving policy actors with abstract terminologies or frameworks. The lack of conceptual clarity stems from a heterogeneous, disciplinary landscape and differing epistemological backgrounds from constructivist and essentialist approaches. The concept embodies a boundary term oscillating between interpretations of resilience as a social construct and as determined by physical environments. Recent literature on climate change adaptation politics and urban planning merge both views in an attempt to grasp the complexity of perceived and factual risks and system vulnerabilities that define adaptive capacity for resilience. While these attempts remain exceptions, this integration seems vital for certain policy fields, such as infrastructure policies. The criticality of infrastructure is determined by perceptions and materiality in the wake of disruptive events or crises. A turn from securitization to resilience strategies also has occurred in the respective academic literature and high-level guidance documents for practice (e.g. at the level of the European Union). Yet, empirical evidence shows a discontinuation in the integration of resilience into the national, political discourse and into the policies on lower policy levels in countries with a securitization tradition, like Germany; particularly at the local, city level. In parallel, alternative, political premises for preparing for complex futures such as transition through socio-technological innovation are on a continuous rise in contemporary urban concepts, as captured in the smart city concept promoted e.g. by the European Green Deal from 2019. Against this background, we ask: Which political premises, derived from resilience or competing concepts, for tackling current and future complexity and uncertainty shape urban policies? What are the main obstacles for urban policy actors to apply resilience in infrastructure policies? In this article, we first depict the different epistemological and disciplinary traditions in resilience theory and competing concepts that guide urban policy practice. We then conduct a comparative case study of four German city projects that aim to improve infrastructure through, among other means, digitalisation. Digitalisation is seen as an instrument for systemic change in urban concepts as well as a potential threat to IT-security in the discourse on critical infrastructure. The case study examines perceptions as well as materiality in the definition of risks and vulnerabilities, and the applied policies through expert interviews and a focus group. While our methods are qualitative and explorative within a small N case study with limited generalizability, we fill an important research gap with first evidence and contribute thereby to the studies on navigating complexity and uncertainty in policy.