The metropolitan scale of resilience

Cities stand at the intersection of the major challenges of the 21st century. Globalization, climate change, mass migration and rapid urbanization have converged to pose disproportionate pressures on urban centers. Over 55% of the world’s population now lives in cities, a number due to rise to 70% by 2050. As today’s cities adapt to these challenges, it is estimated that more than 60% of metropolitan regions that will exist in 2050 have yet to even form. These global pressures affect individuals and systems on the local level, in the cities where they live. While presidents and prime ministers must slowly navigate national and international politics to reach a consensus on solutions, mayors and city leaders are already innovating and deploying new ideas, and making the investments that will provide tangible benefits for their citizens. With cities leading the conversation and driving the most impactful solutions, they must recognize the urgency of planning meaningfully now. Often, a city’s most intransigent shocks and stresses – including flooding, poor mobility, unaffordable and inadequate housing, and the consequences of climate change – transcend municipal boundaries and must be examined, explored and managed at the metropolitan level and through regional collaborations. This is especially true with increasing metropolization, as growing cities evolve into major metropolitan regions. As cities continue their rapid urbanization, they are expanding, and growing even more interdependent with their surrounding municipalities, regions, and rural peripheries, further entrenching symbiotic relationships with them. Traditional boundaries are becoming less f ixed and meaningful, and challenges more acute. Addressing social division, economic inequity, and inadequate transportation, infrastructure, and service delivery systems is becoming even more urgent to ensure resilience amid the growing uncertainties of the 21st century. Resilience is the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city and region to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience. Resilience requires cities and regions to take transformative actions that make them better, in both the short- and longterm, and allow them to not only endure, but thrive, in both good times and bad. These transformative actions can only arise when cities reframe their challenges and opportunities to reflect the dynamics of their entire urban ecosystems. As cities design and implement resilience strategies, they increasingly understand this and the need to redefine previously established social, political, functional and geographical borders, as well as engage with partners and stakeholders that best align with the scope of the challenge. Through case studies from the members that we share with the 100 Resilient Cities network, this paper seeks to analyze the challenges and opportunities of metropolitan-scale planning, and its role in catalyzing resilience objectives. These examples show how the governance structures and collaborations that arose across metropolitan areas tackle the shocks and stresses experienced by cities. We hope, therefore, to contribute to the understanding that all cities, big or small, have to look beyond their administrative borders when addressing their resilience challenges.

source :

https://resilientcitiesnetwork.org/downloadable_resources/UR/The-metropolitan-scale-of-resilience.pdf