Exploring the Significance of Resilience Qualities in the Context of the Middle East Built Environment

Despite applying green urban development concepts and technologies to uphold legacies, the resilience of the urban built environment (UBE) remains a significant challenge. A robust system with high flexibility to climate change can withstand different climate variations with the lowest possible degradation of its performance indicators. An urban system could be designed to be responsive, absorptive, and adaptive to the potential shocks and stresses and utilized to meet particular needs that help rapidly restore the system’s functionality. This paper reviews the major impacts of climate change and investigates the resilience challenges to the cities in the Middle East (ME) from the perspective of resilience qualities. The findings of this study indicate that many cities in the ME are projected to suffer from severe climate change impacts. However, there is an argument that there is still room to develop the necessary risk management plans and invest in building resilient infrastructure and utilities. Considering the resilience qualities and strategies of the built environment components and urban infrastructure can result in robust, flexible, redundant, resourceful, inclusive, and integrated systems. The paper identifies directions of needed work to improve the adaptation of the built environment to climate change.