In this doctoral dissertation, the author aims to make sense of urban risk perceptions and resilience in ordinary, medium-sized cities of the world taking Nepal as the basis. People mobilise themselves in informal groups, such as neighbourhood groups or women’s groups to assess and enact change in the face of everyday risk. Building on observations, two main critiques are addressed to the international aid resilience practices: (1) resilience is often limited to simply brige between silos of international aid, (2) resilience is too often used as a project management tool for practitionners. These two critiques addressed by the author to the practices of resilience of international organisations result in a misunderstanding of local situations.