Dammam metropolitan area: Advancing the pursuit of urban resilience

Urban resilience has become part of the policy orthodoxy in managing climate change and addressing urban sustainability inadequacies worldwide. Several researchers from multiple fields have primed this policy via empirical studies. In this paper, we profile Dammam Metropolitan Area (DMA), a Middle Eastern city in Saudi Arabia, to argue that expanding research on urban resilience to key perspectives and transformative strategies in less researched regions can help ‘diversify’ understandings of urban resilience in ways that advance and consolidate urban sustainability in critical urban studies. We show that urban resilience has been less conceived in land cover changes, land surface temperatures, urbanization patterns, land use planning, and in broadly framing environmental and climate change risks. And as a consequence, many of its implications are either overlooked or uncoordinated. Based on this analysis, we propose a renewed agenda for resilience that re-articulates it as a strategy for sustainable development in DMA via the urban nexus framework.