City resilience & local governments

The advance preparation and planning to minimize human casualties during Cyclone Fani was hailed by all. However several commentators felt that the recovery after the event has fallen short of expectations. Power outages, failed telecom systems, water supply disruptions, and road blockages continued for several days after the cyclone struck. The prolonged power outages in the summer month of May, while causing great discomfort, also exacerbated health concerns. Recovering and getting back to normal had been slow and painful. That is what resilience is all about – the ability to respond to and recover quickly from external shocks and stresses.
Building resilience is key to creating sustainable and successful cities. Resilience is often directed at natural calamities such as heavy rains, floods, hurricanes and other climate events; but must also cover other events such as oil spills, terror strikes, extreme poor air quality, economic disruptions, and mass transit breakdowns. Local governments will remain key players with major responsibility to build greater resilience into urban settlements. There are several areas that local governments can focus on to achieve this objective. Primary could be assiduously building databases on the areas under their jurisdiction. Data could include the age, social and economic profiles of the population with a view to grading their vulnerability in times of specific events. Needless to say local governments are best equipped to do this because of their intimate knowledge of the local landscape. This data will prove invaluable while responding to natural disasters. Proper mapping of infrastructure assets particularly power, water and telecom will enable rate vulnerability levels of these systems and thereby build redundancy and alternate supply sources. Water supply is a particularly valuable service, especially during natural disasters. While identifying supply lines prone to damage, the effort can identify alternate sources which will likely survive.
Local governments can look at the issues of their cities though a resilience lens. Urban planning and land use for example, could build the principle of resilience in aspects such as density and sprawl, extent and design of open and green spaces, wetlands and water bodies, and river systems. The effective functioning of these systems could make all the difference between resilient cities and other cities – between how well some cities withstand, respond to, and recover from stresses and shocks; and some other cities that are not able to.
While the road to building resilience would differ from city to city, some approaches could run through all. One such key approach would be community involvement. It is necessary that local governments constantly solicit community participation in their efforts to build resilience. Members of the community, especially those that are vulnerable need to be aware of the dangers they face and specific actions and behaviour required on their part during specific events.
Local governments need to design their organisations in a way that supports all the above. A move in this direction is the appointment by some global cities of a Chief Resilience Officer. Alongside there is need to build capacity within local bodies across levels so that resilience becomes ingrained in the city’s DNA. While we work hard to mitigate climate change-related events and other man-made disasters, we must also learn to handle those we could not prevent.
This issue of Urban Update carries viewpoints of several urbanists on this subject of Urban Resilience.