Urban areas as socio-ecological systems can be seen as consisting of an urban
environment created by biogeochemical processes (including those originating from human
activities) and governed by natural laws and an interior noosphere created by and
experienced through the human psyche and social interaction to give rise to social and
cultural structures. These two spheres interact to create the dynamics of a city and therefore
urban resilience needs to consider not just biophysical or social resilience, but also the
interactions between them. To date, most work on urban resilience tends to focus on the
exterior aspects of the city, while work on social resilience tends to ignore the city and its
biophysical aspects. This paper explores the interdependencies between resilience in the
social and biophysical systems of the South African city. From the scenarios based on real
events in cities in South Africa we can see the relationships between the social and
biophysical resilience of an urban environment.