by Leire Labaka, TECNUN, University of Navarra, Spain
Nowadays, over half of the world’s population lives in cities, and according to United Nations, 66% of the total world’s population is expected to live in cities by the year 2050. Furthermore, cities have become more and more complex consisting of an extensive network of people, infrastructures and services that are strongly interconnected. With this rapid urbanization, cities are becoming more exposed and vulnerable to the effects of a wide range of spectrum disasters, ranging from acute shocks such as floods and earthquakes to chronic stresses such as the ones caused by climate change or the current COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, due to current globalization, the impact of a disaster can extend the city’s boundaries affecting regions and nations, even the world as it is occurring with the COVID-19 case.
In light of this situation and in order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the citizens, cities must develop resilience capacities to mitigate the impact from crisis to be able to respond and adapt to critical situations in order to keep critical services functioning and recover from the crises as soon as possible and in the most efficient way. Resilience is defined as a transversal capacity that allows to cope with all kind of threats, expected and unexpected. It goes beyond the traditional risk management approach, and apart from preparing for already expected threats it is also focused on developing preventive and adaptive capacities to deal with unexpected and unprepared threats.
Building city resilience requires a holistic approach that includes ensuring the safety of the critical services as well as understanding dependencies among them, developing social skills to build resilient society, enhancing cross organizational resilience and collaboration efforts among city stakeholders and having good leadership and governance systems that entails proper policy decision making. Furthermore, economical measures to withstand the damages and the economic impact due to the crises as well as environmental policies to ensure the regeneration of the affected ecological areas are essential to ensure the sustainability of the city.
Although during the last years investments to build city resilience have been made, in some cases these efforts have been made in a fragmented manner without considering the interdependences among the city stakeholders. This leads to an inefficient use of available resources. Therefore, developing public-private-people partnerships mechanisms is essential to ensure an efficient city resilience building process.
Last but not least, there is a key factor that drives and foster the proper implementation of the resilience building policies, which is Awareness and Engagement. It is essential that city stakeholders perceive and understand the need to develop resilient cities, are willing to act and participate in resilience building activities and as a result their commitment towards resilience building process is improved and the collaboration among the city stakeholders is increased. All this will help us to make our cities resilient.
Leire Labaka is an Associate Professor at TECNUN, University of Navarra.
Email: llabaka@tecnun.es
Link to her profile in TECNUN: https://www.unav.edu/web/investigacion/nuestros-investigadores/detalle-investigadores-cv?investigadorId=10078473&investigador=Labaka%20Zubieta,%20Leire