The next 30 years will witness an unabated population growth. Given this scenario, India will do well to invest its efforts on evolving cities. However, it must identify the challenges early and develop visions, feasible strategies
last week saw a landmark development as Bangalore and Chennai made it into the ‘100 resilient cities network’. The announcement of the incorporation of 35 new cities was made at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Urban Resilience Summit in Singapore.
Significantly, the two Indian cities were chosen among 331 applications from cities around the world for the ‘100 resilient cities network’, pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, New York.
The ‘100 resilient cities network’ is dedicated to help cities around the world so that they become more robust to physical, social and economic challenges, and to demonstrate a commitment to build their capacities in tackling 21st century issues.
The applicant cities were asked to present a clear and compelling description of their major resilience challenges and how they were approaching and planning for resilience to decrease vulnerabilities.
Chennai was chosen for developing benchmark disaster response plans to protect low-lying coastal areas in the face of a high flood risk. Bangalore on the other hand was chosen for its regular desilting projects and public awareness campaigns implemented to combat seasonal monsoon flooding. left unchecked, these natural occurrences have the potential to severely impact the city’s commerce and industry.
Resilience in the urban setting has become a much-talked about concept and is on agenda of many forums across the world. A city’s state of resilience can enable individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kind of chronic stresses and acute shock they experience.
Chronic stresses comprises high unemployment, law and order issues or inept public transport and it tends to weaken the city structure. This is made worse by acute shock in the form of natural disasters. Between 2000 and 2012, natural disasters including weather, health and seismic events, caused damages worth $1.7 trillion globally. The damages were related to direct impact on infrastructure, communities and environment.
As a part of developing resilience, it is crucial to develop a proactive and integrated plan to address and respond to challenges. Ideally, the plan should be incorporated during the urban planning phase, and should be a part of a larger framework that includes health of the community, environment, economy and infrastructure of the city.
However, as much as it is important to create an inherent resilience in the cities, it is also critical to ensure that the same is linked to sustainability. Resilience is often described as the capability of a city to ‘bounce back’ to normalcy from any disturbance.b It is essential that our city develops the capacity to re-build and recover in case of any contingency but also ensure that ecological perspective is addressed in this process.
India can aim for the next phase of urban resilience in the form of social-ecological resilience. This concept helps in moving towards a future of system within the city that promotes sustainability and helps in gradual phasing-out practices in city management that do not account for the environment or optimisation of natural resources needed for the city.
In Indian context, an ideal socio-ecological resilient city must envision less land use, water and energy consumption and produce far less waste. The city must also develop new ways of becoming ecologically regenerative through water-sensitive design, local food systems, and biophilic landscape besides having transit systems along all major corridors that are quicker and more convenient than using a car.
Urbanisation is occurring at an exceptional rate; by 2050, three quarter of the world’s population will live in urban environment. The next 30 years will witness an unabated population growth amid crumbling civic infrastructure and diminishing food and energy security. Given this scenario, India will do well to invest its efforts on evolving cities that are able to consistently adapt to changing conditions by emerging from setbacks and continuously establishing practices that account for the environment.
India must identify the challenges and threats early and develop visions, feasible strategies, spatial scenarios and relevant tools that can guide its cities to address pressing issues such as climate change adaptation and mitigation, natural resources shortage and unsustainable urban growth.
To enable this, mindset needs to be changed, which can be facilitated by adaptive governance and collaborative decision-making. Government must also encourage and empower local communities to make their own climate change and natural resource use strategy. This power to the grass-roots level will drive the change and surely help pave way for establishing socio-ecological resilience for the cities.