5.4 Resilient and sustainable cities pathway
The field of urban resilience emerged in the 1980s as urbanization in hazard-prone locations became recognized as a key driver underlying the increase of the human and economic costs of catastrophic events (Abramovitz 2001; United Nations General Assembly 1989). Urban resilience experts initially focused on hazard and catastrophic risk management, disaster reduction measures and disaster response capabilities in government and business. In the early 2000s, that focus changed to include climate resilience, addressing the growing risks associated with a particular subset of hazards arising from global climate change.
As an emerging field, urban resilience practices were first informed by the experiences of disaster risk reduction experts in confronting both episodic small-scale disasters and the social and economic dimensions of climate-related urban crises and catastrophes (Burayidi et al. 2020). Events such as Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 (Santos 2019) highlighted the extent to which, even in the wealthiest nations, chronic stresses of poverty and inequality, poorly designed transportation and telecommunications systems, weak institutions and poor intergovernmental coordination undermine a city’s capacity to effectively respond to and recover from a disaster and advance its development goals. Similarly, the COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated in many cities how hazards in the public health arena can interact with climate-related hazards to multiply harm and sustain losses, in addition to how the impacts of such interacting shock events can cascade through particular vulnerable business sectors, livelihoods, households and communities.
These events have highlighted the social and institutional dimensions of a city’s resilience capacity and advanced a new developmental approach to urban resilience (Davoudi et al. 2012), as discussed in the resilient and sustainable cities dimension in chapter 4. This approach was pioneered by La Red throughout Latin America in the 1980s, before being promoted by the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network in 2008, and the 100 Resilient Cities initiative in 2013 (100 Resilient Cities 2019; Martín et al. 2018).
The developmental approach to urban resilience considers how chronic stress and vulnerability in a city’s population, communities and institutions contribute to its risks, in particular those that arise from stresses borne by the urban poor and other vulnerable groups (such as disenfranchised racialized,and ethnic groups, migrants, those with disabilities, elderly persons, youth and women) or by particular economic sectors. The result is an urban resilience model focused on the city’s underlying capacity to absorb shocks, adapt and “bounce forward” to achieve and sustain its development ambitions. This approach differs from the earlier disaster risk reduction focus on “bouncing back” from a shock event to a city’s original state without addressing its chronic stresses and vulnerabilities. To apply the developmental approach, urban planning, investments and technical solutions that are needed prior to, during, and following crises to reduce
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catastrophic exposures, survive acute shocks and adapt should be designed to reduce the chronic stresses that the city’s poor and vulnerable face, and to strengthen local government institutions, their functions, processes and operations, and relationships with communities and social organizations (Collier et al. 2014). Measures to reduce and mitigate the risks of future shocks should therefore ultimately be designed to provide co-benefits and should strive to meet current development ambitions and needs (Tanner et al. 2015).
Building on this model, the pathway for building urban resilience will focus on the following two foundational capacities of city governments and urban communities: v resilience planning capacities of local governments, and their city-building partners and community stakeholders, and related processes for policy, planning and institutional reforms, which are needed to prepare and implement a cross-sector, holistic, developmental strategy and agenda for society-wide resilience, and
v resilience design in the context of specific urban investment projects, programmes and operations, which should be regularly prioritized through the resilience planning process mentioned previously.
5.4.1 Developing resilience planning capacities and processes
Local governments that pursue a developmental resilience approach have typically developed two key planning processes and capacities. Both of these approaches need more collaboration between local government and service utilities, the private sector and community stakeholders across all sectors, and other levels of government. These approaches involve: i) Resilience assessments. Some cities have institutionalized a range of comprehensive hazard and stress assessment processes to determine the cumulative risks arising from the interaction between potential shock events and existing local populations, as well as institutional stress conditions under different scenarios. A resilience assessment typically considers near-term quantifiable risks and longer-term (for example, 30 year) hazard, exposure and vulnerability trends and scenarios that could undermine the city’s strategic or longer-term development goals. The assessments cut across different thematic and operational areas, addressing their interdependencies, and identify priority areas of exposure and risk that require system-wide resilience-building efforts. Such efforts include actions to strengthen the capacity of households, communities, businesses and organizations to respond, adapt and recover from shock events. Performance indicators can be developed to help monitor and guide the contributions of different sectors and programmes to the development of such system- wide resilience.
Establishing such a comprehensive view of conditions and interdependencies between government, private, civic and community situations generally requires
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