Resilience is becoming a key representational concept across academic, policy and planning literatures, creating a need to explore fully how experienced forms of resilience emerge. In this article we respond to this by analyzing how locality-based resilience is made, in the example of the emergent Slow City movement in Australia. Through their activities and narratives Australian Slow City leaders expressed their relationship to the (broadly sustainability-oriented) goals of the movement’s framework in relation to the maintaining and making of local specialness and recovery. To understand this we go beyond the binarisms connoted by a concept of resistance through contestation or reterritorialization, to suggest such resilience is made through the relationality of things, narratives, flows and processes that traverse the local-global in between.