Cities, Citizens, Resilience: Tools and People

Resilience, defined as the ability to find a new balance after a disturbance, to renew, to reorganize and to adopt new paths to better protect from potential disasters or disturbances, is a subject of concern for regional managers. It provides new perspectives for dealing with unfavourable environments and / or crises of various origins.

Applying resilience to cities and regions implies the use of levers such as learning, innovation, development of cooperation and solidarity between stakeholders. It is a way to enrich conventional approaches usually focused on limited aspects, and to integrate sector-based approaches into overall objectives. Using resilience means taking into account the different scales of time and space, the capacity to act, the role of the population, the nature and the quality of links between stakeholders and monitoring and surveillance.
It promotes appropriate responses, which are in a certain sense “tailor-made” solutions. This entails combining anticipatory actions to prevent conflict with approaches designed to address slow disturbances such as socio-economic crises, job losses, and climate change that durably affect regions. For this it is necessary to build systemic knowledge taking into account the history, the identity and the ability to cope with disturbances, to better understand the dynamics and local resources, and to mobilize and produce new levers using organizational and social creativity in order to create meaningful projects in a collective way.
The three approaches proposed in the workshop will present research and experimentations on urban resilience, in order to answer the question:
How can towns and cities engage in a process of resilience that enables them to adapt to risks and disruptions of all kinds, to anticipate predictable developments, improve the quality of life of residents, to protect the environment, to preserve economic interests and to respect lifestyles and cultures?
The testimony of Diponegoro University (UNDIP) in Semarang (Java, Indonesia) will explain the situation of a city faced in its highly urbanized coastal strip with permanent natural hazards that cannot be restrained by conventional technical devices, even very sophisticated ones. These phenomena affect the poor neighbourhoods and transfort infrastructure at regional level. The scientific understanding developed by UNDIP makes it possible to predict changing phenomena and their impacts. But the actions implemented remain isolated and of limited effectiveness. Since 2013, UNDIP and Cerema have engaged a process of resilience to adapt the city and anticipate future changes, addressing all sustainable aspects for the region.

The Advisor of France-UNECLAC cooperation on Climate and Sustainable development will demonstrate the actions implemented in Latin America to anticipate and mitigate the expected impacts of climate change in cities, actions that take into account all the regional issues (agriculture, water, management, risk, inclusion of populations, etc.) by making human beings central to the processes.
Finally, CEREMA will support those testimonies by presenting a specific technological point: the exploitation of satellite imagery to improve knowledge and development of regions and to shorten the reconstruction time of towns and cities after a shock.