The seismic events of February 6 in Türkiye have unequivocally highlighted the extent of the risks inherent in contemporary urbanization practices and the production of the built environment. These earthquakes have brought the long-standing urban crisis into sharper focus, significantly heightening public and academic awareness. In an era characterized by multiple, globally pervasive crises, each exhibiting unique contextual dynamics, there is an urgent need for a novel paradigm and an action-oriented approach to managing the inevitable processes of urbanization.

As a consequence of the globally influential political economy, an intertwined spiral of ecological, economic, democratic, and social crises has precipitated an integrated urban crisis. Consequently, cities have become the most significant socio-spatial spheres where natural events such as earthquakes, floods, fires, and pandemics escalate into disasters with increasing severity and frequency. Additionally, emerging issues such as migration and poverty have altered the social composition, rendering access to essential needs like food and water and urban services such as education, health, housing, and transportation have become increasingly limited. These conditions exacerbate inequalities and injustices in resource distribution, trigger anti-democratic interventions, and generate conflicts at various scales. Furthermore, these processes not only affect cities but also significantly transform the production and social relations defining rural areas, causing rural settlements and communities to be adversely affected by the crisis spiral. Consequently, a destructive transformation is rapidly advancing toward a newly restructured process in all human systems, both globally and locally.

The radical transformation observed in political, economic, social, ecological, and spatial systems necessitates a reconsideration of the resilience of cities and societies and demands an integrated approach. Adapting to the increasing variety and impacts of threats posed by multiple crises, learning how to cope, and enhancing resilience capacity have become increasingly important, requiring a multi-dimensional and multi-layered perspective on new urban and social ideologies. It is crucial to establish a foundation for a future vision and outline the path to achieve this vision, recognizing that conceptual and theoretical discussions alone on resilient city and society construction are insufficient.

The 9th Conference on Urban Studies, under the theme of Resilient Cities and Communities, aims to address resilience at the urban and societal levels during this critical juncture at local, national, and international scales. Organized as a significant part of the ‘Resilient Cities and Communities’ project led by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), the Conference seeks to provide insights into how to approach mitigation, recovery, and reconstruction processes in a broader framework through resilience in the aftermath of earthquakes, as we begin to review our urbanization approach. It aims to contribute to both theoretical and practical fields. In this context, the Conference will discuss perspectives to be adopted in decision-making, policy, and planning processes, reflecting on traditional and contemporary tools that guide implementation and deliberating on inclusive methods and mechanisms encompassing all these processes. The main agenda will include evaluations of national and international approaches and implementation examples, discussions on new paradigms and their advantages and disadvantages, qualitative and quantitative studies examining the current situation from different perspectives, reviews on new methods and tools that can be used to increase resilience capacity, discussions on institutional, legal, and administrative infrastructure deficiencies and potentials, and proposals concerning our experience with the process.

The 9th Conference on Urban Studies invites studies that address these themes, providing a platform for critical examination and the exchange of innovative ideas and practices in building resilient cities and communities.