Building Urban Resilience

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Principles of Urban Resilience

• Risk information provides a basis for prioritizing risk reduction measures. Sharing hazard and risk information with stakeholders is critical in managing the risks facing urban communities and sectors. • Creating an enabling environment for communities to participate and make decisions based on adequate risk information and tools fosters the collective resilience of an urban system.

Key Resources Section

Resource

Urban Disaster Resilience

Natural Hazards, Unnatural Disaster: The Economics of Effective Prevention. World Bank 2010.

Risk, Uncertainty, and Complexity

Lall, S. V., and U. Deichmann. “Density and Disasters: Economics of Urban Hazard Risk.” Policy Research Working Paper 5161, World Bank 2009.

Disaster Risk Management and Opportunities for Resilience

Improving the Assessment of Disaster Risks to Strengthen Financial Resilience: A Special Joint G20 Publication by the Government of Mexico and the World Bank. World Bank 2012. Hyogo Framework for Action 2005–2015: Building Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters. UNISDR 2006.

Social Resilience

Climate Resilience and Social Change: Operational Toolkit. World Bank 2011.

Land Use Planning

“The Role of Land-Use Planning in Flood Management: A Tool for Integrated Flood Management.” APFM Technical Document No. 12, Flood Management Tools Series. World Meteorological Association 2008.

Urban Ecosystems

NYC Green Infrastructure Plan. New York City Department of Environmental Protection 2010.

Urban Upgrading

Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and the Urban Poor: Cities Building Resilience for a Changing World. World Bank Urban Development Series. World Bank 2011. Jha, Abhas, and Henrike Brecht, “Building Urban Resilience in East Asia,” Eye on East Asia and Pacific, Issue 8. World Bank 2011.

Incorporating Resilience into the Project Cycle

Urban Disaster Resilience Resilience is the ability of a system, community, or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to, and recover from the effects of a hazard promptly and efficiently by preserving and restoring essential basic structures (UNISDR 2011b). A resilient community is one that can absorb disturbances, change, reorganize, and still retain the same basic structures and provide the same services (Resilience Alliance 2002). As a concept, resilience can be applied to any community and any type of disturbance: natural, man-made, or a combination of the two. Disaster resilience can be seen as a public good that builds an a ppropriate amount of redundancy into urban systems and encourages communities to plan how to deal with disruptions. In practice, finding ways to operationalize resilience is not easy (Upton and Ibrahim 2012). Addressing disaster risk in the context of resilience encourages Building Urban Resilience • http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/978-0-8213-8865-5

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Building Urban Resilience

Published on Mar 6, 2013

World Bank Publications

Resilience is the ability of a system, community, or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to, and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner. Resilience in the context of cities translates into a new paradigm for urbanization, and forms base for a new understanding how to manage hazards and urban development. In the next decades, the major driver of the increasing damages and losses from disasters will be the growth of people and assets in harm’s way, especially in urban areas. Often lacking resources, infrastructure, services and the capacity to manage the increase in population, small cities could face heavy losses of life and property due to disasters, unless proactive measures are mainstreamed into governance and planning.