Flooding poses a major challenge to urbanised areas around the world. Increasing resilience is therefore key, especially in low-lying coastal areas. To assess to what extent and why flood risk management projects improve urban resilience, we developed an approach that combines an assessment of impacts on an area’s functional resilience and the adaptive capacity of citizens. Application of the approach to the Dudley Creek flood remediation project in Christchurch, New Zealand, shows that the project had a positive impact on the area’s resilience. Yet, if the project had paid more attention to combining hard infrastructure interventions with citizen engagement, its positive impact would have been higher. This study confirms the relevance of combining engineering and social perspectives on urban resilience, both in assessing resilience and in designing flood risk management projects. Practitioners are invited to use the framework to design projects that improve an urban area’s resilience in a holistic manner.