GESTÃO AMBIENTAL: Cities worldwide are shifting focus to resilience and renaturing

quinta-feira, 4 de dezembro de 2014

Cities worldwide are shifting focus to resilience and renaturing

Illustrative image - city of Barcelona

Tópico 1000

The ideas of renaturing cities and making them more resilient is gradually creeping up the international agenda. This week it was announced that 35 cities have joined the Rockefeller Foundation's Resilient Cities project, while a successful EU conference in Milan has just finished, which heard many examples of cities throughout Europe that are hosting regeneration projects.

The Rockefeller foundation made the announcement in Singapore, having chosen the 35 cities from applications by 331 cities across 94 countries. These cities ranged in size from 50,000 to over 10 million in population and almost 70% of them came from the developing world.

Of these 35 were picked, bringing the total population of the cities in the network to over 700 million. The Rockefeller Foundation's project is called the 100 Resilient Cities Network and is now two thirds of its way through appointing the network's members. The final tranche will be announced in a year's time.

Among the winners are a historic safe haven for refugees and religious minorities in the Middle East that is innovating to address everything from droughts to floods; and one of the biggest industrial and commercial centers in South Asia that is grappling with the importance of how to take preparedness beyond disaster response to deal with challenges ranging from solid waste management to tsunamis.

These cities will receive support to host a Chief Resilience Officer, who will work across government departments to coordinate and oversee the resilience activities, and ensure that resilience is a citywide priority by creating a resilience plan and have access to a platform of services from both private and non-profit sectors and to the experience of the whole network.

The Foundation's Judith Rodin said: "we were blown away by the thought and detail that went into this year's applications, and the dedication that each city demonstrated in confronting its challenges with innovative and collaborative solutions".

The Network is currently seeking to fill positions to support its expansion.

The network defines resilience as enabling "cities to evaluate their exposure to specific shocks and stresses, to develop a proactive and integrated plan to address those challenges, and to respond to them more effectively. Resilience is about making cities better, for both the short and long-term, for everyone".

Judith Rodin, opening the urban resilience summit, said resilient cities "bend not break". “Local data for resilience” will be a key theme for ICLEI's Resilient Cities 2015 conference.

Meanwhile over in Milan, in the conference on Renaturing Cities, Jane Jacobs was throwing light on the importance of inclusion in this process. "Cities have the capacity of providing something for everyone only because and when they are created by everyone," she said.

In this context Stockholm, which promotes the digital inclusion of people over the age of 65, was highlighted as an example of age friendly solutions.

This conference discussed nature-based solutions to making cities more resilient, and inclusive, by being able to provide green spaces for safe, healthy, social activity, for absorbing excess rainfall and pollution, and for producing food.

The EU Conference on "Renaturing Cities: Systemic Urban Governance for Social Cohesion", under the auspices of the Italian Presidency of the Council of the EU, covered research and innovation policies on sustainable urban development, and was attended by scientists, policy makers, the business sector and representatives of the civil society.

Listed by region, the 35 new Rockefeller Foundation resilient cities are:

Africa

Accra (Ghana)

Arusha (Tanzania)

Enugu (Nigeria)

Kigali (Rwanda)

Europe

Athens (Greece)

Barcelona (Spain)

Belgrade (Serbia)

Lisboa (Portugal)

London (UK)