Raising standards of urban resilience

Citation

(2014), "Raising standards of urban resilience", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 5 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJDRBE-04-2014-0031

Raising standards of urban resilience

Article Type: News articles From: International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Volume 5, Issue 2

Well-planned cities are resilient cities. That is a fact any urban planner knows. However, as cities’ populations and spatial areas expand at a historic pace, we must correspondingly evolve our approach and thinking about the social, environmental and economic services and functions a city provides – not just to its own inhabitants, but to all human settlements.

Nearly 180,000 people are added to the urban population each day. At this rate, by 2030, it is expected that 70 per cent of the world’s population will reside in cities, with the fastest rate of growth happening in Africa and Asia. Growing informal settlement populations present a further layer of complexity for cities in developing nations. Today, some 1.5 billion people live in informal settlements without adequate access to healthcare, clean water and sanitation. The International Federation of the Red Cross estimates > 100,000 people move to slums in the developing world every day – i.e. one person every second. Many of these people are at risk of hurricanes, cyclones, flooding, earthquake and epidemics, as well as other man-made threats, including crime and climate change. Adding to the challenge are the “unknown” risks many cities may face as a result of urbanization, advancements in technology, diversification of energy sources and other factors.

The interconnected nature of these conditions, coupled with an increasing global reliance on the exchange of goods and services produced in cities, only strengthens the social and economic imperatives for ensuring the resilience of all urban settlements.

To achieve resilience in the new urban era, we must first understand what it means to be resilient. The United Nations (UN)-Habitat defines resilience as the ability of any urban system to withstand and recover quickly from any plausible hazard. Critically, this definition includes ensuring a continuity of services necessary to maintaining civil and economic stability.

Raising standards of urban resilience means moving beyond the current risk reduction paradigm, which is often remedial, or palliative in nature, and towards a future, target driven urban development agenda, which integrates resilience planning, development, and management, says Dan Lewis, Chief of UN-Habitat’s Risk Reduction Unit and City Resilience Profiling Programme (CRPP).

“In doing so, resilience becomes much more than a way to mitigate risk, but creates a pathway toward achieving economic growth and equitable living conditions”, says Lewis.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s President, Dr Judith Rodin, describes this approach as the “Resilience Dividend”[#fn1]. According to Rodin, realising the “Resilience Dividend” requires upfront investment, both in terms of financing and resources; it requires innovation to solve known vulnerabilities and also for unknown variables; and it takes partnerships with the private sector, both to uncover weaknesses within systems and to unleash the full range of financing for resilience projects and infrastructure.

“In turn, cities will see direct economic benefits”, says Rodin, emphasizing that investment creates jobs today and saves money in the longer term – it costs 50 per cent more to rebuild in the wake of a disaster than to build the infrastructure to withstand the shock.

These principles form the basis for the CRPP. Officially launched in 2012, the rationale for the development of the CRPP was the recognition that the projected growth of urban settlements over the next 30 years will demand new tools and approaches that strengthen the capacities of local administrations and citizens to better protect human, economic and natural assets.

The goal of the CRPP is that cities are safer places to live and work, as urban managers are able to implement strategic development planning and programmes that are target-specific “markers” for resilience to multi-hazard catastrophic events.

Working in conjunction with ten core partner cities, located in both developed and developing countries, the CRPP this year began piloting the City Resilience Profiling Tool, a comprehensive diagnostic that represents the first of a five stage cyclical process toward achieving urban resilience.

The diagnostic allows cities to prioritise areas for structural and non-structural improvements and investments. The results form the basis for the second part of the cycle, which is the development of Resilience Action Plans. The third and fourth stages involve the execution of these plans in the form of economic assessment and capital acquisition. The final stage takes local authorities and urban managers back to the diagnostic tool as a monitoring mechanism to capture positive (or sometimes negative) gains against a range of “ideal” conditions.

The cycle will help cities to reduce uncertainty by generating a holistic risk “profile”, and anticipate new potential threats. Ultimately, reducing uncertainty and improving the way local authorities and other urban stakeholders and citizens think about resilience can help unlock new financial opportunities, raise living standards and strengthen governance capacity required to ensuring the maintenance and functioning of urban areas during times of crises.

In addition to its core partner cities, the CRPP and its corresponding tools are available to a growing cadre of “associate” cities, through partnerships with organisations such as the World Bank, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative.

The programme will be made available to all cities by 2016, with the aim of establishing a global model for measuring and increasing urban resilience to environmental, social and economic crises.

This year’s World Urban Forum, taking place in Medellín, Columbia, April 4-11, will bring together > 20,000 urban experts from local governments, civil society, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private sector and other stakeholder groups to focus on the various dimensions of achieving urban equity. The final day of the Forum will culminate with a Resilience Dialogue. The primary aim of the Dialogue is to demonstrate how a holistic approach to urban resilience that considers all functions of an urban system can contribute to making all cities more equitable places to live and work.

Speakers include:

• Dr Judith Rodin, President, The Rockefeller Foundation.

• C40 Climate Leadership Group.

• The World Bank.

• Siemens.

• Margareta Wahlström, Special Representative to the UN Secretary-General on Disaster Risk.

The dialogue will be moderated by Ludwig Siegele, International Editor of The Economist.

For more information, visit http://wuf7.unhabitat.org

Note

http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/blog/realizing-resilience-dividend