Deeply threatened by natural disasters, especially earthquake, typhoon and flooding; Taiwan has been seeking an effective approach to enhance the urban adaptive capacity to hazards. Urban renewal, which was seen as a tool to stimulate urban economic development as well as promote planned redevelopment and utilisation of land, has been transferred to a solution to mitigate the disaster risk from the view of the authority. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of urban renewal programmes on urban resilience to natural disasters. A disaster resilience framework was built through literature review first, and then a comprehensive review of the urban renewal programme of Taipei City, including laws, regulations, government’s policies and research reports were conducted. Also, interviews among different actors engaging in the process of urban renewal and disaster prevention were carried out to analyse how urban renewal programme has affected the urban resilience, both on the physical and social environment. The result suggests that urban renewal programme may increase the physical resilience to disaster through improving build environment and natural environment capacity; however, in terms of improving the social adaptive capacity, the effect of urban renewal programme is quite limited. Since the concept of disaster resilience, especially social resilience, have not been involved in the urban renewal relevant policy and plan-making process in the first place, the linkage between urban renewal and building disaster-resilient city is fragmentary. Furthermore, despite similar goals, the different departments in the municipality have worked in parallel, which results in the inefficiency of improving resilience through urban renewal approach.