Pilot4Dev Director Dr. Pascaline Gaborit explained about the Climate Resilient and Inclusive Cities (CRIC) Project’s efforts in building city resilience, in a webinar organized by the University of Liège, Belgium, December 9, 2021. The webinar emphasized that building city resilience is an ongoing process, requires multi-stakeholder engagement and relies heavily on commitment and political will.

The webinar “Urban Resilience” was organized by the University of Liège for engineering students at the university as part of a post-graduate course initiated by Professor Youssef Diab, an early warning systems expert and CRIC project partner. The webinar aimed to provide participants with insights into three specific and different approaches to urban resilience: scientific and technical approaches, historical and political perspectives from European countries and the context of international cooperation in Southeast Asia.

In her presentation, Dr. Pascaline Gaborit explained that CRIC, a five-year project funded by the European Union, aims to address climate change adaptation challenges in Southeast Asia, which is vulnerable to natural disasters and has challenging infrastructure. She underlined how fundamental it is to understand the linkages between the complexity of risks, exposure to hazards and solutions.

Reflecting this, the CRIC Project carefully identified priorities in the pilot cities to determine the appropriate tools to use. For example, from the five pilot cities in Indonesia (Banjarmasin, Samarinda, Mataram, Ternate and Pangkalpinang), it was found that development priorities and risks depended on various physical, political, socio-economic parameters and how different solutions were offered for each city.

“Key strategies needed to implement efficient urban resilience include multi-stakeholder cooperation, integration of multi-risk analysis, working with local communities to address their needs appropriately, the need for adaptive design, utilization of smart technology for Early Warning Systems, and financing and accountability,” explained Dr. Pascaline.

Building back better

The webinar also featured Rita Der Sakissian, Ph.D, a researcher specializing in demo-sensing, GIS and urban planning who explained the concept of “Building Back Better”.

This concept relates to post-disaster recovery that aims to avoid the impact of previous vulnerabilities and increase future resilience. Rita Der Sakissian questioned the vagueness of the word and definition of “better” which could include the following:

• Restoring infrastructure functionality and making it more resilient to future shocks
• Building Back Greener, shocks can be an opportunity to achieve environmental sustainability and address climate change.
• Implementing human-oriented reconstruction with better, optimal and modern services

The concept of Building Back Better is highly dependent on the surrounding context, such as disaster intensity and damage, pre-disaster infrastructure conditions, social capital, wealth, development, institutional structures (networks of stakeholders, experts, NGOs and communities), as well as available resources and temporal dimensions.

Cities and political commitments: Barcelona

Meanwhile, another speaker, Ignasi Fontanals, Director of Rezilio Technologie for the European region, gave a case example of the History of Barcelona (Spain) from a political perspective. Barcelona transformed from a city that experienced various urban planning challenges into a model of a resilient city in Europe. In his presentation, Ignasi outlined 30 years of city management under the leadership of different mayors.

Barcelona is a compact city flanked by two rivers and adjacent to mountains, accommodating a wide range of industrial and tourist activities. The city benefited from the Olympic Games in Barcelona, which provided an opportunity to rebuild the city, especially after the storm that destroyed La Rambla in the 1990s.

Between 1982-1997 Pascual Maragall invested in the construction of key infrastructures through flood management and the coordination of technical networks to facilitate the dissemination of city maps between private parties contributing to the public space. Joan Clos (1997-2006) then developed wastewater management, Jordi Hereu (2006-2011) created Security Service Supply, a public electricity service especially during blackouts. Jordi Hereu also applied a holistic approach to connect various stakeholders such as city administrators with the private sector. Then between 2011 and 2015, Xavier Trias built a platform to address city management and urban resilience standards, drawing on the work of his predecessors. Ada Colau (2015-present) chose social resilience with an emphasis on social services.

Through this exposure, Ignasi said that “resilience is a continuous process that depends on disruption but also strong political will.”

This online dialogue has sparked a variety of responses, particularly on the role of political will in implementing city resilience or supporting financing processes, especially in international cooperation.