Chapter 6: Future cities – resilient cities

Here, Bloomberg and Pope (2017) were writing about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina that hit the city in 2005, and used it as an example of the need for more urban resilience.

We would like to echo that sentiment. As we write this book, we are aware of the challenges that natural and human-made hazards are bringing to cities. The definition of resilience itself is not one people argue about: it is the ability and capacity of urban areas to bounce back socially and economically after being hit by a freak event. Resilience as a concept is linked to the fact that more and more people on this planet are living in denser areas. At any given moment, more people than ever before are being threatened by local events, whether a storm, freak rainfall or an enduring heatwave. In the 100 Resilient Cities Campaign, the Rockefeller Foundation went even further in identifying challenges that cities face and need to become resilient to. The threat of cyber-attacks becomes more plausible each day, and could severely disrupt city life. In this case, the Rockefeller Foundation (2017) chose a broad approach to resilience, not just defining it as a response to natural hazards: