Abstract
Whereas "keeping the water away" has long been the byword of academic and institutional circles in urban planning, the idea of "living with water" is progressively catching up. Nowadays, national and local authorities tend to share a common vision of resilient cities that would be ready to live through floodings without incurring major disruptions. This being said, if we look at how resilient urban design has been recently put into practice across various districts built in flood-prone areas, numerous contradictions remain. Upon closer examination, these reveal a clear lack of innovation in the way construction choices are made and architectural solutions designed. Resilient solutions may strenghten the city, but they do not lead to complete resilience. There is still a long way to go in order to achieve resilient urban design as well as knowledge management systems. Building on French case studies, this article shows that resilient urban projects are not a translation of urban resilience understood in a systemic sense. Resilient urban design is rather to be considered as a local, always negotiated and potentially contradictory translation of urban resilience. When it comes to city spaces, little attention is paid to their qualities, their different meanings and scales or to their inhabitants' daily lives. We suggest to resolve these contradictions by setting the foundations of a practice-based and in-situ resilient urban design.