Making Cities Resilient Report 2012

CHAPTER 3 | Key Trends on Resilience-Building in Cities
City size and economic base
Institutionalized community participation is not
limited to low-capacity contexts, as exemplified
by Oak Bay in Vancouver, which is a Campaign role
model on the basis of its participatory approach
to resilience building. The success of participation
in small, low-density urban areas in high and low
capacity contexts could be explained in part by the
existence of a more personal connection between
local government and the public, or because more
rural livelihoods often mean that communities are
more directly affected by the impact of relatively
small-scale hazard events (such as damage to
crops), and are therefore more motivated to take
part. The main challenge for institutionalizing
public participation in large cities is up-scaling,
although much can be learned from the city of San
Francisco (USA) – a highly developed and large
city with 805,235 inhabitants – which has a wellembedded
community participation programme
(see box 4.4).
Copyright CORILA
Venice’s rich cultural heritage, residents, and tourism industry, faces risks
of flooding and sea level rise.
Smaller towns and cities may suffer from a lack of human capacity and financial resources, and, as a
result, larger and more sophisticated hazard mitigating infrastructure (such as flood drainage, dams,
coastal management) or early warning systems and forecasting technologies tend to appear more
in larger, wealthier cities including Jakarta, Bangkok and Metro Manila. This is also driven by the high
concentration of population and assets in large towns and cities, which necessitates hazard mitigation on
a larger scale. High population density and size also means that emergency management is logistically
more complex in large towns and cities, demanding particularly solid institutions for coordinated risk
response. This explains the strong focus on institutionalization in many large cities, including Jakarta,
Mumbai and Makati.
This is not always the case and many smaller municipalities have found ways of overcoming capacity
challenges in order to introduce highly complex technological, institutional and structural risk management
systems. Decentralization of disaster risk reduction resources from national to local government is a key
mechanism for this, while many municipal governments have also made use of partnerships, including
with NGOs and the private sector. Chacao, Venezuela, for example, has a modest resident population of
71,000, but a highly sophisticated warning system that includes wireless communications technology.
Again, the public can also be a valuable resource to assist in forecasting and early warning, illustrated
for example, in Ancona, Italy, where neighbourhoods have landslide monitoring equipment that feeds into
real-time slope stability monitoring at the city scale.
In summary, many factors affect the types and effectiveness of resilience building activities cities
undertake. A useful distinction is that between activities seeking to improve structural resilience (risk
mitigation strategies that seek to resist the impact of hazards) as opposed to social resilience (activities
which strengthen the coping capacity of communities). A combination of both approaches is necessary
to reduce both exposure and vulnerability to disasters. To date, generally speaking, larger cities tend
to focus more in institutionalization and mitigating infrastructure (focusing on structural resilience),
while municipalities with less intense urban development have undertaken proportionally more social
development and livelihood promotion activities (greater focus on social resilience). Cities’ experiences
also show that these associations cannot be assumed and there are many exceptions to the rule. Rather,
resilience outcomes are shaped most strongly by the environmental and governance landscape of the city.
Making Cities Resilient Report 2012 | 37