Making resilient cities

As a result of rapid urbanization, a changing climate and political instability, cities and its citizens are facing new and amplified challenges: From earthquakes to flooding, rapid immigration to cyber-attacks, most cities are confronted with a range of shocks and stresses, natural and human-made.

In order to cope with these numerous challenges, the global community is increasingly realizing that we need to build resilience into our cities by empowering and strengthening the capabilities of local government and their partners, including local populations.

This Dialogue aims to focus and debate on policy recommendations for more resilient cities, in alignment with the implementation of the New Urban Agenda and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a special reference to SDG11, which targets more resilient cities in the world.

The session will explore different resilience strategies on the city level, national resilience plans, tools and indicators for capacity development and the potential of global partnerships for succeeding in urban resilience.

Cities and other human settlements increasingly struggle with the impact of crisis: from conflict to natural disaster, failures in governance to economic stress. Inherently, the consequences of crises are always most dramatic the most vulnerable groups.

A resilient city assesses plans and acts to prepare for and respond to all hazards – sudden and slow-from the onset. By doing so, resilient cities improve their ability to protect and enhance people’s lives, secure development gains, foster an investible environment and drive positive change.

Unplanned cities are more vulnerable to shocks as they often have pre-existing stresses. Cities that are not prepared for or unable to recover from shocks, stresses on the system can accumulate or magnify other challenges.

In view of the present scenario, urban resilience has gained greater prominence over the past decade in the international development discourse and agenda, emerging as one of the core principles of sustainable urban development, as outlined in the Agenda 2030, the New Urban Agenda, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030.

A participatory approach is crucial when implementing resilience strategies: By engaging all stakeholders, cities have the ability to harness transformational change and improve the lives of their inhabitants. However in almost all contexts, cities lack the capacity to operationalize these and fully harness change.

Resilience offers a crucial meeting point among different yet essentially similar paradigms in urban development. To be truly resilient, cities should work towards sustainability to ensure positive long-term impacts, and in the same manner, being truly sustainable entails incorporating resilience to drive and protect development goals.

Building urban resilience takes on multiple forms, but always must be for the betterment of people, specifically those in vulnerable situations. In addition, a successful urban resilience agenda requires partnerships between all key international actors, as well as the engagement with principle city players. Inclusive cooperation is needed in order to build upon a shared resilient vision.

Q1: What are key elements/characteristics of effective policies in urban resilience?

Q2: What benefits are cities seeing from enacting urban resilience actions?

Q3: How can we take into account the vulnerabilities of people when making resilient cities?

Q4: How can we promote stronger multi-stakeholder partnerships and coordination among cities towards more resilient cities?

Q5: What can we learn from past and present resilience-building experiences in developed and developing cities? Which innovations have emerged?

Q6: How can we International Organizations (United Nations and non-United Nations) support the implementation of resilience goals and strategies as outlined in the major global international agreements, with a special focus on the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda?