How to build the cities of the future: ensure resilience
Cities are the centre of development and growth, and are one of the most permanent structures of human development.
The success of cities is tied to their ability to consistently adapt to new challenges. However, for them to not only survive and see stable growth, but to thrive, they must become a resilient city: a city capable of absorbing shocks and overcoming challenges, harnessing these experiences as positive opportunities for development.
Four common types of resilience cities develop are towards violence, sustainability, political shifts and demographic changes. There are a number of exceptional examples in each case that show how important developing resilience is for creating innovative and stable environments.
Strong resilience to combat violence.
The city of Medellin was plagued by an incredibly high criminal activity rate. In 1991, the city had a murder rate of 380 per 100,000 people; the global average is 7.6 per 100,000. Time magazine dubbed it as ‘the most dangerous city on earth’.
Yet in 2013, the city was hailed as the ‘most innovative city in the world’, and the crime rate has dropped significantly.
“The metro was the beginning of all the good stuff. It was like a bridge to a different world. We suddenly realised that things could change. It was the beginning of a revolution in Medellin.”
This transformation is partially due the voluntary approach of the mayors to opening up city’s peripheral areas, and implement the now famous metro and cable car systems. Simultaneously, efforts were made to improve education and increase citizen participation in order to empower the citizens to become co-responsible for changing their lives.
Strong resilience to improve sustainability.
Curitiba, Brazil. The city was long considered the sleeping place between São Paulo and the surrounding agricultural regions. However, the sleepy town was disrupted by huge incoming migration from Europe; in just 20 years the population more than doubled from 140,000 to 360,000, with the majority of residents settling in favelas. This caused chaos with travel, and car jams stretched for miles.
Determined to fix this problem, mayor Ivo Arzua implemented a new masterplan for the ‘Curitiba of Tomorrow’ to guide the city toward growth and order. This strong political will led to consistent new ideas being tested and implemented, and impact tracked.
A number of these initiatives led to the city being named as the Green Capital of Brazil. One was the Bus Rapid Transit system, which saves residents up to 25 minutes in travel time and has a hugely positive social impact. Another is aimed at ensuring huge waste landfills are avoided: the ‘trash-for-tokens’ scheme allows residents to trade their trash for fresh-produce tokens. This waste can then be sorted and recycled. 90% of the city’s residents participate in the recycling programme, and more than 10,000 residents use of the trash-for-tokens exchange. Additionally, the city has been designed to maximise green space, at currently, there is 50sqm of green space per resident (whereas Buenos Aires has just 2).
Strong resilience to political shifts.
In 1989, Berlin had to reunite two very different halves of one traumatised city, and needed to do so quickly. It displayed impressive resilience capabilities: aligning two city administrations, re-integrating citizens, and creating a new vision for a city: ‘Arm aber sexy’ (poor but sexy), which for a long time remained the unofficial tagline for the city.
The well-structured process and forward-focused vision by which the city was reunited, followed by the clever branding as affordable and cool, resulted in it becoming one Europe’s most thriving cities, and one of the world’s startup capitals.
Strong resilience to demographics changes.
More recently, a national movement was created in France to foster resilience in smaller cities that are losing their diversity, and are slowly finding themselves with an older demographic. In the past 15 years, the commercial vacancy rate in these cities has increased at an average of 4% year on year.
The movement “222 Coeurs de Ville” is institutionalising the need for these cities to adapt and rejuvenate themselves. Initiatives already fostered by some mayors include short-term and lower mortgages for younger citizens, and economic strategies to promote local businesses.
Building resilience: the common narrative
It’s clear that there are a number of shared characteristics in each of these examples of resilience:
- Shock: The cities faced an extreme challenge
- Awakening: There was a sudden realization of the challenge and a profound determination to change from the city officials
- Shared goals: There were set goals and timeframes that would create lasting, future-proof impact (transparent to the city’s citizens)
- Innovative thinking and the right timing: To promote resilience and ensure action, cities and public servants had to trust themselves and seize the opportunity.
“We had to work fast to avoid our own bureaucracy, and to avoid our own insecurity, because sometimes we start to think: ‘That’s a good idea but I cannot make it happen.’ So the key issue in Curitiba was to start — we had the courage to start,” Jamie Leiner, former Mayor of Curitiba.
- Consistency: To ensure the positive and long lasting effects of radical changes, it was ensured that the initiatives could be consistently maintained overtime, and become part of the city’s fabric.
In our work with cities and local governments in France, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, it is clear that digitalisation has come as a common shock. It’s something endemic over which public-sector workers lack control.
Yet digitalisation is an increasing legal requirement for local government — France for instance must be fully digital by 2020, and digital citizen participation is also becoming a requirement (and 50% of local governments don’t feel prepared for the use of new digital medium), plus there are increased budget constraints. This is a shock from which city governments cannot hide, and one to which they are fast awakening. Cities must become resilient to new technologies; and this is something we empower governments to do.
In relation to digital citizen participation, city officials must:
Create a common goal that is transparent to its population: Improved local environments are created through utilising collective intelligence and giving ownership to all actors.
Be willing and open to change: This not only means reacting to citizen suggestions, but encouraging change internally. In order to do this, institutions must champion education on digital participation to ensure all members of the department are included, and can take responsibility for to digitalising.
Remember that profound change takes time: You won’t see results overnight. The implementation of new solutions, such as a digital participation tool, requires a comprehensive explanation of how it should be used for all those who will use it, they must use it repeatedly, and should continually be reminded of its existence, until its use becomes the norm. And do note that a lot of problems will arise simultaneously — simply take one problem at a time.
To become a lasting city, resilience needs to become part of a city’s bloodstream. As we’ve discussed, ensuring resilience is an ongoing process. But is the base from which all future developments can flourish. It’s not something to be underestimated.
Authored by Héloïse Le Masne, Partnerships Manager and Head of Engagement
Edited by Emily McDonnell, Head of Communications
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