D7. Resilience in Cities

Example: resilience in cities Cities have become the central framework to sustain human life. While growth may seem an attractive option for cities, consid­ ering the potential economic benefits, we are well aware that growth alone leads to undesirable cities. Applying resilience as a strategy instead of growth is a more effective means to arrive at both economic growth, and an actually flourishing city. A city wanting to improve itself can see that growth isn’t necessarily a good thing. Growth will fluctuate, and end. While a growing city increases resource flows, this can only be temporary, and eventually it will either shrink or run into a resource shortage. This is also because with increased size, resource consumption tends to grow in a non-linear fashion, as well as overhead costs for infra­ structure and management. This means that ensuring quality of life, safety, and healthy living environments during growth is no trivial task. What will steer that, what is its target? And when growth ends, the challenge then becomes how to flourish in either condition of growth, while becoming resilient for the long run. If the city focuses on resilience rather than growth, the result is, as a necessary conse­ quence, a more diversely-mixed, flexible, and dynamic urban landscape. It will have less monocultures of office parks and suburbs (which eventually drive traffic congestion out of bounds). It leads to dealing differ­ ently with resource management, this costs in investment terms, but pays off in the long run with clean, healthy living conditions, lower utility and maintenance costs. It will deal with the uncertainty of fluctuation resource flows in the future, will restructure itself to allow for changes in demographics and lifestyles, and start to shape itself according to its inherent strengths. When implemented effectively, this leads to better living conditions for all inhab­ itants, creating a more attractive city, attracting more businesses and investment, and which then causes economic growth. The result is a different trajectory, that leads to a completely different, better performing city, while at the same time leading to better economic conditions. Rather than growth as a driver for economic wellbeing, resilience is used as the driver instead. Economic health is achieved through a different pathway, that simply regards economic growth as a side-effect of being a great, beautiful, healthy, and future-proof place to live and work. Creating such as ‘resilience’ policy will automatically start to influence other areas of systemic concern as well, such as energy, sanitation, poverty alleviation, infrastructure, and cultural programs. For example, it leads to a city in which health is increased by means of biodiversity growth. It means reduced transport loads by smarter reallocation of workforce distribution. These are win-wins that aid to in concert, like instruments in an orchestra, help to achieve benefits that drive the larger goal. This way, a resilience driven strategy maximizes positive benefits on the United Nations