Making Cities Resilient Report 2012

CHAPTER 5 | LOOKING FORWARD: WHAT ARE SOME POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO MEASURING RESILIENCE IN CITIES
What cities interviewed indicate as components of successful
risk reduction in their city
Essential 10: Reconstruction
Essential 9: Preparedness
Essential 8: Environment
Essential 7:
Training
and Awareness
Essential 1: Institutional and
Adminstrative Framework
Essential 6:
Planning
Essential 5:
Schools and Hospitals
Essential 4:
Infrastructure
Essential 2:
Financing
Essential 3:
Risk Assessment
Second, projects that address specific risks, including improving infrastructure to control floods retrofitting
buildings, or construction of safe schools, were cited as the second most important component of
resilience building, based on the specific risks facing the respondents’ cities.
Third, the risk reduction priorities of local governments are context-specific, pointing to the fact that
indicators must be locally developed, based on the city’s risks and its current governance systems. A city
in an earthquake-prone area with many buildings that are not earthquake-resilient would see retrofitting
and replacement of this building stock as a chief indicator of their resilience. Another city that has
recently experienced a large-scale disaster would prioritize risk-sensitive urban planning and the initiation
of activities to address risk as a good indicator of resilience. For a territory (region) plagued by regular
flooding, cooperation among regional stakeholders of a river-basin may be an important indicator. These
findings reveal that existing global indicators as part of a planning process are just a starting point and
that the process itself of developing local and context-specific indicators is an equally important step
toward resilience.
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