The Cities Alliance is delighted to announce that we will serve as a Platform Partner for the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) campaign.
The global campaign is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century. It promotes a view of resilience that includes not only shocks – disasters like earthquakes, fires, and floods – but also the stresses that weaken the fabric of a city on a daily or cyclical basis, such as unemployment and social inequality.
One of the key components of the campaign is knowledge sharing so that cities are not constantly reinventing the wheel. By becoming part of the 100 Resilient Cities network, cities gain access to solutions, service providers, and partners from the private, public and NGO sectors who can help them develop and implement their resilience strategies.
Cities Alliance will leverage its extensive experience aligning community, city and national government actors by partnering with select 100RC cities to support local government resilience planning and implementation for a more “risk-ready” future.
Within this context, as a Platform Partner, Cities Alliance will partner directly with selected African, Asian and Latin American cities in the 100RC network starting in 2015:
-- Facilitate access to networks of organised informal workers and slum/shack dwellers
-- Provide links to experts and practical experience in city resilience strategies, economic growth and gender mainstreaming
-- Respond to requests for information to knowledge products on secondary cities, environmental planning, national urban policy, land expansion policies, incremental housing and Habitat III
-- Conceptualise and facilitate knowledge exchanges
-- Share good practices on City Development Strategies and slum upgrading
-- Connect cities to the latest methodologies for rating the enabling environments for city performance in Africa, including understanding bottlenecks to more effective municipal finance systems
The 100RC initiative fits in very well with the Cities Alliance’s own strategic goals. Promoting city resilience is a key theme of our Medium-Term Strategy for 2014-2017, and our members are currently developing a Joint Work Programme on Resilience that will benefit substantially from partnering with the 100RC campaign.
And in keeping with our focus on reducing poverty and harmonising member efforts, the Cities Alliance is investing in innovative frameworks, diagnostics, knowledge sharing, learning platforms and decision-making tools – all to support cities as they seek to address shocks and stresses related to vulnerabilities in the economy, environment, governance and service delivery systems.
In addition our collaboration with 100RC, the Cities Alliance has also been selected as an endorsing partner at the 6th Global Forum on Urban Resilience and Adaptation, to be held in Bonn, Germany in June 2015.
