Designing City Resilience

Designing City Resilience is an international summit, taking place on 16 and 17 June 2015 in London. It will include the City Resilience Challenge, a workshop providing a unique opportunity for professionals from the built environment, government, insurance, finance, technology and communications to work on real issues faced by cities around the world. It is hoped that outcomes will be applied by cities to improve their resilience and help with future growth and investment. www.designingcityresilience.com

The concept of designing resilient cities is, at its heart, one of prevention and preparedness. With its roots in the humanitarian sector, resilience is essentially a way of safeguarding cities and their citizens from unexpected events, says Peter Oborn, RIBA vice president, international, and chair of the editorial panel of the Designing City Resilience summit.

With the world’s urban population forecast to increase by 2.5 billion by 2050, there is a clear need to help countries to prepare and respond to unexpected events, and designing resilient cities is key in these efforts.

Achieving resilience is a classic design problem. Poorly designed cities, or cities that are undergoing rapid urbanisation without considering resilience, can waste money and create environmental and social issues; and they are are more vulnerable to disaster. Resilient cities, on the other hand, will be less susceptible to disruption and able to respond and recover more quickly.

One of the big benefits of resilience is that it provides a lens through which a city’s physical infrastructure, together with its social, economic and cultural landscape, can be viewed in a coherent and interdependent manner. A resilient approach to urban development encourages professionals to work together, to create truly interdependent buildings, infrastructure and systems.

Resilience allows policy makers to create legal and political frameworks to help mitigate the problems of urbanisation. It is therefore vital that national and local governments engage with everyone involved in the planning, designing and building of cities, along with the humanitarian sector, to reach a common understanding of what resilience is, and work together to achieve it in a city context.

The Designing City Resilience summit, being organised by RIBA on behalf of the Commonwealth Association of Architects this June, aims to provide an international forum to encourage dialogue between government and a wide range of professions, so experience can be shared and new ideas explored.

The challenge of creating resilient cities is not restricted to new, rapidly growing economies and societies in vulnerable regions: it may have different impacts, but every city around the world needs to consider resilience. Only by approaching planning and development in a co-ordinated and interdependent way will cities meet the demands of citizens now and in the future.

For more information, visit www.designingcityresilience.com; visit our Facebook page; follow us on Twitter: @rescities and connect via LinkedIn.

Read RIBA chief executive Harry Rich on designing for resilient cities here