Encouraged by the perception of a growing use of the term resilience on official documents, in academic environments and in the popular vocabulary, the present work aims to explore the conditions for the dissemination of the term, as well as the consequences of its use in public policy discourses. The concept, which was popularized in the context of the biological sciences, was transported to the social sciences through a theoretical convergence between the rationalities of ecology and economy. This movement resulted on a new conception of the social world, in which it is conceived as complex, permeated by all sorts of risks, and populated by fundamentally vulnerable subjects. The wide employment of the concept by the New Urban Agenda, UN-Habitat s main document for urban policy formulation, demonstrates the degree of legitimacy that was conquered by the idea of an urban resilience. In order for us to better understand how the idea is evoked in practice, we will analyze its use in the contexts of Hurricane Katrina, when it hit the South of the United States, in 2005, and in the context of Samarco s dam rupture in Mariana, which took place in 2015, in Minas Gerais.