Mapping Resilience: A Proposed Graphical Language

Resilience theory is a growing discipline with great relevance for the discipline of planning, particularly in fields like energy planning that face great uncertainty and rapidly transforming contexts. Building on the work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, this paper begins by outlining the relationship between resilience and energy planning, suggesting that planning in, and with, time is a core necessity in this domain. It then reviews four examples of graphically mapping with time, highlighting some of the key challenges, before tentatively proposing a graphical language to be employed by planners when aiming to construct resilient energy plans. It concludes that a graphical language has the potential to be a significant tool, flexibly facilitating cross-disciplinary communication and decision-making, while emphasising that its role is to support imaginative, resilient planning rather than predict the future.