Building Urban Resilience: Principles, Tools, and Practice

This handbook is a resource for enhancing disaster resilience in urban areas.It summarizes the guiding principles, tools, and practices in key economic sectorsthat can facilitate incorporation of resilience concepts into the decisions aboutinfrastructure investments and general urban management that are integral toreducing disaster and climate risks.

Resilience is the ability of a system, community, or society exposed to hazardsto resist, absorb, accommodate to, and recover from the effects of a hazard in atimely and efficient manner (UNISDR 2011).

In the context of cities, resilience translates into a new paradigm forurbanizationand influences the way we understand and manage urban hazards,as well as urban planning in general. It provides practical rules of thumb that canguide stakeholders’ decisions to incorporate the management of disasters andclimate risks into urban investments. In practice, operationalizing resilience ischallenging(Upton and Ibrahim 2012). To facilitate this process, this handbookprovides guidance on how to build urban resilience into critical infrastructureand the social realm by taking advantage of available methodologies, tools, andresources.

In the next decades, the major driver of the increasing damages and losses fromdisasters will be the growth of people and assets in harm’s way, especially inurban areas (IPCC 2012). Cities are the quintessential complex adaptivesystems(Montenegro 2010). By 2050, the United Nations expects 80 percent ofthe world’s populationto live in urban areas (United Nations 2009). In East Asia,the urban population is expected to double between 1994 and 2025 (Jha andBrecht 2011). Often located along the coastline, in flood plains, or along seismicrifts, cities with their concentration of assets and people are vulnerable to disasters.Rapid and unplanned urbanization, which takes place on marginal lands andhazardous areas, in combination with poorly constructed settlements anddegraded ecosystems, puts more people and more assets in harm’s way.

Rapidly growing peri-urban, small, and middle-sized cities are particularly atrisk. They often lack not only financial resources, infrastructure, and services butalso the capacity to manage the increase in urban population even as theirexposureis increasing. This will translate into heavy loss of life and property ifthere are climate and disaster events unless proactive measures are mainstreamedinto urban governance and planning processes.

East Asia and the Pacific, along with South Asia, are particularly vulnerableto natural disasters. Globally, Asia Pacific is the region most affected in terms ofeconomic impact and numbers of people. In the past year, the earthquake andtsunami in Japan, large-scale floods in Thailand, and the tropical storm in thePhilippines have been tragic reminders of the devastation, economic and socialdamages, and loss of human life disasters cause. They offer valuable lessons tourban disaster risk management practitioners.