Glasgow, Stockholm and Melbourne by resilience and planning scholars, this paper synthesizes practitioner insights into how resilience thinking can inform metropolitan planning. The paper identifies three ways resilience thinking can usefully inform metropolitan planning. First, by offering new metaphors regarding the nature of structural change in linked and complex systems that prioritize change and uncertainty. Second, through the application of new frames and tools for analysis of the dynamics of complex social-ecological urban systems. Third, by examining the relevance of adaptive governance for metropolitan planning.