TO THESE SOCIETAL AND LOCAL ISSUES FOR A
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Mercer: “In other words: what are the major threats to a city?”
Finch: “Exactly. Cities in different parts of the world will face different issues of resilience and adaptability. We need to understand the local climate and the cultural elements.
“Understanding the local context and how people want to live in that particular environment (including the family structure and how that needs to be supported through the built infrastructure) is important to enable the resilience of that city from a societal perspective. We need to learn lessons from the past and implement those for future design.”
Roberts: “The question is: how do we plan for adaptation to these societal and local issues for a city that’s being built with a 50- to 100-year lifespan?”
Mercer: “If we had to look back over five or 50 years, what would the evaluation criteria for a successful city be? What is a successful city from a resilience perspective? I don’t think we’re asking the right questions yet. We have a feel for what such a place should look like in crude terms, but we don’t know what the success criteria are. This needs to be considered now and, however imperfect such criteria might be at the outset, it will need to be adopted and refined as we learn from lessons throughout our journey.”
Finch: “But in some ways there could be a really simple answer to that: a fundamental aspect of a resilient city is that it’s a place where lots of people want to live and will continue to want to live 50 years from now. Keeping things simple, if you want to live there rather than having to live there, it’s probably because of the choice of jobs, the attractiveness of the urban realm and so on
– there are lots of different aspects. Whether or not people want to live in a city is a good measure of its adaptability and, therefore, its potential resilience.”
Mercer: “Here’s a dilemma: to make a place really attractive/resilient costs money. How how are you going to achieve that in the developing world and at the rate required?”
Finch: “That’s the question isn’t it? No one thing will make a resilient city and the costs involved will be different for every city. In most cases, though, the upfront costs of building for resilience should be small against the potential savings. We need to come up with innovative ways in which these investments can be funded, especially in the developing world. “But I think what this discussion has highlighted is that building resilient cities shouldn’t only be about designing an
insurance policy against negative shocks – it’s not just an additional cost. It’s also an opportunity to build better living environments, improve environmental quality, encourage diverse communities to live together and secure a better economy that improves everyone’s living standards. That’s got to be the key to a resilient city.”
Mercer: “And, ultimately, how far can we or should we take resilience? What should we be realistically looking to control and adapt, and how should we be factoring this into our cities of the future, at the same time making them places in which we want to live – and can afford to live?”
More work on this topic will be explored by our Cities Board in the coming months and we look forward to sharing this with our clients and partners as we embark on this journey together.
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