Building Resilience

Sustenance of the city as one organism.

- Abin Chaudhuri

Livability and future cities are now the emergent fundamental research in urban studies and development. In the coming decade, more than 2 billion people need a new place to live and work in cities, a place now seen to be crumbling or resisting challenges every day, due to failure of infrastructure over sudden surge in population.

With the increasing onslaught of natural disasters, the backlash from human interference on nature and man-made conflicts put our settlements at unprecedented risk. The vulnerability of the built environment is exposed daily, as more news of delayed or non-existent recovery from such calamities and response from governing bodies are deemed insufficient. The problems are always traced back to limited risk assessment criteria and resource allocation based on theoretical models. Building resilience of cities is a call long-awaited. Resilience is not only about recovering from threats, but also to ADAPT, GROW and THRIVE, as the Rockefeller Foundation proposes.

Challenges in Resilience