Cities the world over are seeing greater disruption because of climate change. Close to home, Canadians had a summer of flooding and wildfires.
Addis Ababa Riverside Green Development Project, also known as the Sheger Beautifying Project. This project aims to reduce flooding and pollution as well as to offer green and public space for residents and to create job opportunities.
Social aspects to city life pose challenges as well: In January, Ontarians learned that there are now 25 per cent more people living in shelters or on the street in Ontario than just two years ago. And according to the UN, 75 per cent of cities around the globe have less than 20 per cent of their area dedicated to public spaces and streets.
So when TMU professor and researcher Christopher Gore connected with fellow researchers on a defunct urban resiliency project, he saw a natural experiment in the making.
In 2013, the Rockefeller Foundation embarked on an ambitious journey to reshape urban resilience through its 100 Resilient Cities initiative. With the vision to make cities safer, more inclusive and sustainable, the program provided funding and resources for 100 cities worldwide to employ chief resilience officers and develop comprehensive resilience strategies based on a framework developed by the foundation.
The Resiliency project looks at both climate-related resiliency efforts in cities, as well as social ones. Glasgow is one of the 100 original cities that was chosen for the project.
The chosen cities spanned continents, from Toronto to Rotterdam to Addis Ababa, and the strategies these cities developed aimed to make cities more resilient in the face of environmental and social vulnerabilities.
The initiative addressed the UN's Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11: make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
But just six years and $164 million USD later, the foundation unexpectedly shuttered the program, leaving many cities with a resilience playbook and no financial means to deliver the strategies.
Instead of packing in the project, Gore and his collaborators - which includes principal investigator Matthew Hoffman from the University of Toronto, Michele Betsill from the University of Copenhagen, Sarah Sharma from University of Ottawa and Laura Tozer from University of Toronto Scarborough - saw it as an opportunity to investigate what happens to these resilience commitments when external support dries up.
The team's research project is now contributing substantially to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), because it's offering vital insights for urban policymakers globally. By archiving and analyzing city-level strategies, the research team is identifying lessons for municipalities, aiming to lift actionable items from cities who are facing similar challenges.
"This global inventory functions as a resource for cities hoping to understand how other cities with similar challenges are addressing them," Gore says. By comparing strategies, cities can discern which policies are both politically and technically feasible for them.
A natural experiment
"The Rockefeller Foundation's abrupt conclusion of funding was a complete surprise," says Gore. "It presented us with an intriguing natural experiment; suddenly we had the opportunity to say well, what happened? How powerful is this concept?' We were curious about the vitality of resilience concepts at the municipal level beyond the financial incentives."
Their research is exploring the various trajectories cities took post-funding. Gore's team chose 20 cities from the initial 100 with different geographic and economic backgrounds to study to see how they've adapted - or not - to the absence of the 100 RC initiative. To do so, they're employing case studies, social network analyses and deep-dives into the cities' actions.
"We wanted to have global representation in choosing the cities," says Gore. "So we chose cities that were in Europe, North America, Asia, East Asia, Africa and Latin America. We wanted to look at how much cities prioritize an environmental lens versus an equity lens in their conception of resilience." This fits well with SDG 11, Gore says, because it focuses on responses to natural disasters as well as provides for mitigation of vulnerabilities in populations.
The research team chose Toronto as one of the 20 cities they would examine more closely. The city was one that, prior to the initiative, was already doing resilience work.
Specific city case studies
The City of Toronto happened to be one of the original 100 cities chosen for the project, and one of the 20 the research team studied post-funding.
"In the case of Toronto, the city had done a lot of work on resilience previously, under the umbrella of climate change and sustainability," says Gore. "So here we didn't see a profound shift and the work continued."
Other cities saw more drastic responses, and Gore cites Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as one example. "In this case, when I met with the resilience team there, they are still continuing to use the resilience framework and the mayor has continued to fund and support the resilience staff." The city has invested significant financial resources into greening infrastructure and creating public space. It is also regularly assessing the vulnerability of the population to determine interventions to lessen those vulnerabilities, whether that be in relation to food security or housing.
Consultation with community members was the biggest aspect of developing the resilience strategies. Because, Gore says, even conveying what the teams were doing was a task. "In the case of Amharic, the dominant language in Ethiopia, there's no word for resilience," he says. "So they focused on the issue of vulnerability and the capacity of the city to take initiatives that would allow it to respond and support the city population when moments of vulnerability to the city materialize."
This meant consulting with 3,500 people in the city of Addis Ababa to understand what issues they confront on a routine basis. "This meant asking everything from, When you experience flooding, what do you do?' To What do you do when there's a heat wave without cooling centres?' It really became an inventory of responses from the community on the types of experiences they have," says Gore.
Research findings
Though the team is still doing interviews, they're seeing some preliminary findings. Gore's team saw that cities with a historically strong climate action backdrop shifted focus to improving social equity and reducing vulnerabilities. "The legacy of previous climate work made them much more directed to the equity dimension of vulnerabilities in the city like access to food or the quality of housing," says Gore.
In Toronto, the team learned that the notion of resilience resonated widely with political leaders and community members. Whether a community had suffered a shock or stress to their housing conditions - for example, a fire - or the city was building a strategy to address the risk of flooding, the notion of resilience was unifying. It helped leaders and community members think about the interventions or investments needed to minimize community vulnerability in the face of shocks.
One of the project's major revelations is that it allows cities to understand how its own citizens perceive vulnerability. "In getting away from a very top down process, they were forced to engage in a community-based process of examining what was most needed. This aligns with SDG 11 to really focus on community sustainability and well-being from the perspective of the communities in which you're trying to protect," says Gore.
"Interviews show that there's an interesting tension around how and which initiatives they choose to pursue, and some of it is going to be conditioned on the resources they have internally, whereas low-income cities can't undertake the kind of things that they may want to do or the ambition they may have in the absence of external support."
"This inventory will provide a real service to other cities," says Gore. "The other big thing this project is doing is for those cities that are perceived to be the most vulnerable, I think there's going to be an interesting lesson to see that when resources and political commitment is made to the concept of resiliency, it serves as a powerful organizing concept, particularly in addressing both climate and vulnerability in cities, and really drives actions with respect to social well-being in those cities. I think people will be a bit surprised to find that low-income cities have embraced the concept and continue to use it and they find that it has resonance with the population."
