About us
Our vision
Our vision is to cultivate a global community of professionals that experiment and learn to tackle the urban resilience challenges we face in our day to day work. These challenges range from topical ones (for example urban water resilience) or geography specific ones, to challenges such as how we navigate interdisciplinarity, how we make the case for resilience (sometimes in our own organisations), how we translate theory into practice, or how we navigate the many tools and approaches for building urban resilience.
The goal of this community is to facilitate peer learning between mid-career urban professionals and act as a multiplier force so that together we feel less lonely in the face of the issues we face in our work.
We do so through topical working groups, regular learning workshops, mentoring, regional hubs and collaborative projects. We are enabled by an online exchange platform on Slack and curate a knowledge hub via our blog. We facilitate interactive events for the wider field and are planning to host a global summit of urban resilience professionals.
Who we are
We are a community of 50+ academics, practitioners, and policy makers based in over 20 countries. We have initially met as participants of the Bloxhub Urban Resilience Summer School, a capacity building programme aimed at mid-career urban professionals. The community of practice is formed of 2019 and 2020 alumni — you can see the full map here.
We come from different disciplines and work in different sectors, but what we share in common is a commitment to tackling urban resilience challenges through systemic approaches and collective learning. We are lifelong learners who believe that a problem shared is a problem halved — especially when it comes to the challenges we face in our day to day work.
Our values
Why this community of practice?
Adapting our cities to the increasing effects of climate change creates numerous challenges, ranging from considerable knowledge gaps in our understanding of causes and effects, gaps in how we mobilise the knowledge on urban resilience through policy and practice, as well as capacity building gaps relating to how we, as researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, are equipped to address these issues in our work.
Tackling these challenges requires interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration. Yet many times, that’s easier said than done. In our work as researchers, practitioners or policy-makers we are driven by different incentives, success factors, or time horizons. Delivery timelines mean we sometimes deprioritize learning and don’t invest in our own personal development.
The unique strength of this community of practice is that we span disciplines, sectors and geographies, as we believe that only by breaking the silos between academia, practice, and policy making we will be able to tackle urban resilience challenges. We’re a peer learning space that is volunteer run — as such our activities and experiments are driven by our learning and inquiry questions.
Communities of practice mobilise the power of peer learning to create trusted spaces for learning and experimentation. Understanding learning as a relational, lifelong process means we acknowledge that building our capabilities to tackle complex urban resilience issues can be accelerated by having a trusted space of peers to learn from and experiment with. Read more about what communities of practice are here.
We’d love to have you as part of this community
Do you work in urban resilience? Do you want to connect and learn with other researchers, practitioners, and policy makers? Are you committed to learning and collaborating? Then hop on board, this might be the space for you.
Fill in this short form and you’ll be able to access our Slack platform and join an onboarding event.
