Are Resilient Cities A Metaphor for Deliberate Disruption?

In the public interest.

This subject matter can be overwhelming. It is not unlike going down a rabbit hole.  Deborah Tavares came to light revealing Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars which is a document that outlines a strategy of totalitarianism. Research the subject and decide for yourself.  I found Deborah an honest citizen highly concerned.

Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars pdf link:  http://www.stopthecrime.net/docs/SILENT%20WEAPONS%20for%20QUIET%20WARS.pdf

Other links:

https://www.rand.org/about/edu_op.html
http://www.100resilientcities.org/cities/melbourne/

Kill Cities by Rothschild and Rockefeller – Deborah Tavares

 

100 Resilient Cities

Melbourne’s Resilience Challenge

http://www.100resilientcities.org/cities/melbourne/

Vulnerable to extreme weather events, this Australian city has already made huge steps toward increasing its resilience.

Melbourne’s Resilience Journey

The city of Melbourne released its Resilience Strategy on June 1, 2016. Explore the strategy here.

Melbourne’s Resilience Story

The municipality of Melbourne covers 37.5 square kilometers. The residential population of the city proper is only about 105,000. However, the metropolitan region is home to roughly 4 million people. Unlike many other cities around the world, Melbourne City Council has limited mayoral powers. Transport, energy and water systems are all managed by various government and non-governmental bodies. The city is located in a region prone to extreme weather events, is likely to experience significant climate change impacts and has many upstream dependencies. The city has undertaken significant work to enhance its resilience, including developing adaptation strategies and plans, establishing networks, developing emergency management plans and undertaking risk assessments. Despite progress, significant opportunities remain to enhance Melbourne’s resilience, particularly through more carefully coordinated efforts.

SHOCKS AND STRESSES

  • Aging Infrastructure
  • Coastal / Tidal Flooding
  • Declining Population / Human Capital Flight
  • Disease Outbreak
  • Drought
  • Lack of Affordable Housing
  • Rainfall Flooding
  • Sea Level Rise / Coastal Erosion
  • Terrorist Attack

Meet The Chief Resilience Officer (Melbourne)

Toby Kent has created and implemented resilience and sustainability strategies across a range of sectors. Since the late 1990s he has worked with governments, communities, industry sectors, and many other stakeholders on five continents.

Various achievements include: helping to guide the growth of Corporate Citizenship, one of the UK’s preeminent specialist Sustainability consultancies; leading PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Sustainability work with retail and consumer goods companies in the UK; and running PwC’s Sustainability & Climate Change team in Hong Kong.

Prior to joining the City Of Melbourne, he worked with leading Melbourne businesses, including MMG mining corporation and ANZ bank, where he was Head of Sustainable Development.

Toby has a Masters degree in Urbanisation (Housing and Social Change) from the London School of Economics.

What Is The 100 Resilient Cities Platform of Partners?

04.02.2015

100 Resilient Cities was created in part to help solve two key problems:

  1. Cities are complex ecosystems, resistant to change and made up of a myriad group of systems and actors; and
  2. Existing solutions aren’t scaling or are not being shared more broadly. In other words, cities constantly find themselves reinventing the wheel.

Our Platform of Partners, one of the four key offerings we provide our cities, is designed to help address the second problem. Through our Platform Partners, 100 Resilient Cities provides member cities with access to a curated suite of resilience-building tools and services supplied by a carefully selected platform of partners from the private, public, academic, and non-profit sectors.

The Platform and our Platform Partners are a way to leverage resources beyond the $100+ million commitment that the Rockefeller Foundation initially made when it pioneered 100 Resilient Cities as part of its centennial commitment to urban resilience. The catalogue includes tools and services that cities might not otherwise be able to access for a number of reasons, such as affordability, not knowing that the tool existed, or not understanding that it could be applied to address their unique city needs.

The tools and services we have on our platform can help educate our cities and can facilitate the planning and implementation of their strategy process. For example, we have tools that aggregate, evaluate and integrate big data into decision making; encourage stakeholder engagement; assess risk exposure to hazards; monitor and protect water resources; design resilient urban infrastructure and environments; identify opportunities for operational efficiency and provide education around the concept of resilience.

City resilience will improve, the marketplace will produce better tools, and the global practice of resilience will advance.

How does it work?

Cities surface unmet resilience-building needs during a six-to-nine-month Strategy development process, and 100RC matches those needs with the capabilities of our Platform Partners.

The list of platform partners is growing quickly and can be found here.

Although it won’t address all of our cities’ resilience-building needs, the Platform’s purpose is to help cities identify some of the tools and services they can use that have worked elsewhere. With the support of the Platform, cities can address many of their current resilience needs and begin to build the capacity to continue working on their resilience building into the future.

Helping individual cities isn’t the only goal. By introducing these world-class actors to cities, we are facilitating a process by which the cities themselves help inform the market place. Once they understand what cities need, these private sector, NGOs, and publicly funded partners can begin building new tools and improving old ones – tools that will be available to all cities.

Through our Platform, cities will become more resilient, the marketplace will produce better tools, and the global practice of resilience will advance ever further.

100 Resilient Cities is adding new member cities to our global network through partnerships with local entities that provide financial support for the work.These cities are full network members with all benefits and services, following our globally tested methodology to improve urban resilience. Successful candidates for sponsored membership in the 100RC network will be partnerships between cities and individual, philanthropic, institutional or corporate funders.

In August 2018, 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) announced the selection of Houston as the newest city to join our global network since the close of the 100 Resilient Cities challenge process in 2016. Houston’s membership in the 100RC network is sponsored through funding by Shell Oil Company, which has a long history of applying technical and strategic solutions to some of the most complex projects and challenging environments in the world.

If you are interested in joining the network, or sponsoring a city to join the network, please complete the form for initial information below. Due to the high volume of interest we receive, 100RC may not be able to respond to every inquiry.

 

Our Approach to Measuring and Evaluating Impact

We capture learnings and track impact in three ways. When combined, we hope the resulting lessons and insights will help advance the work of urban resilience practitioners around the world.

External researchers: The Urban Institute and a series of global partners are conducting an external evaluation of our partnerships with cities and industry leaders over the next five years.

Internal Monitoring: Regular tracking of program activities and outcomes helps us drive toward success and course correct when there are important lessons to apply to our program and partnerships.

City Reporting: Regular reporting directly from our cities allows us to identify regional and other trends, learn together, and apply cities’ experiences of success and challenges.

For more information or to partner with us on research: info@100resilientcities.org

Bridging the infrastructure gap: Developing bankable, resilient projects

07.22.2019 | by Jonathan Woetzel and Aaron Bielenberg

As more and more cities take action to implement a range of initiatives and projects in their Resilience Strategies, it makes sense to consider how major disruptive trends are shaping infrastructure delivery and impacting resilience investment choices. Technology is reshaping the infrastructure landscape in multiple ways, changing both asset class attractiveness and the way things are built.

However, all of this technology disruption is taking place against the backdrop of a persistent, massive infrastructure investment gap exacerbated by increasingly stressed public balance sheets. The good news is that the $120 trillion in assets under management by private investors could help plug this gap[2]—but right now this isn’t happening. Currently, there is a lack of bankable projects that are attractive enough to private investors.

So what can be done and what does this mean for cities? Public funding alone clearly will not suffice for their infrastructure investment needs, and cities are considering new approaches to attracting private capital. One compelling way forward is to foster well-structured project development processes and internal capabilities designed to improve project bankability and attract the investment dollars they need. Bridging the funding gap requires action from both the private and public sectors: the regulatory environment and public sector capabilities to monitor and manage infrastructure delivery are often keys to success.

There are several levers for improvement that cities can consider in order to make projects more bankable. Proven actions include:

  1. Market creation: for example, by adopting P3 legislation and pursuing a regulatory environment that helps attract private capital, building a track record through small pilot projects, benchmarking against peers and addressing shortcomings, and fostering a vibrant secondary market for infrastructure assets.
  2. Enabling business planning, for example, by providing a transparent roadmap of key regulatory and permitting requirements, adopting widely used revenue model components and addressing financial risks, and assembling a complementary advisory team.
  3. Addressing technical and project delivery by implementing standardized frameworks for contracting, adopting performance-based procurement rather than forcing design and technology choices, and adopting flexible local requirements.
  4. Enhancing stakeholder engagement through implementing a plan for targeting, sequencing, and delivering outreach to key stakeholders (investors, development partners, community representatives) so as to reduce overall political risk.

To this end cities can consider a number of factors to make projects more bankable, across six dimensions: the PPP environment, technology risks, commercial viability, the regulatory environment, construction risks, and political and currency risk.

Examples of best practices can help highlight what can work when cities innovate and invest in building transparent pipelines of bankable projects, as some of the projects featured at The 2019 Urban Resilience Summit underscored. Two such projects showcased during the Urban Infrastructure Marketplace. The High Capacity Metro Transport Route in Pune, India and Resilient Kindergartens projects in Tbilisi, Georgia demonstrate the power of early stage support in advancing infrastructure projects along the project cycle.

Sustainable projects will add trillions to the world’s infrastructure costs as cities seek to ensure that transport and energy networks, waste and water facilities will be climate resilient, socially inclusive, and contribute to reducing carbon emissions. Success is reliant on attracting private-sector investors to find new ways to bridge the investment gap, which in turn will depend on concerted action from the public, private sector, and multilateral development agencies. We were excited to be a part of this dialogue as the 2019 Summit’s Innovator Partner, and are optimistic about the ideas exchanged that could shape the future of sustainable, resilient infrastructure in cities.

To learn more, check out Bridging infrastructure gaps: Has the world made progress?

[1] 63 percent of the infrastructure need will be in emerging economies: Jonathan Woetzel, Nicklas Garemo, Jan Mischke, Priyanka Kamra, and Robert Palter, Bridging infrastructure gaps: Has the world made progress? MGI, October 2017, McKinsey.com.

[2] Dominic Barton, Bridging the infrastructure gap, Project Syndicate/MGI, June 14, 2016, McKinsey.com.

Jonathan Woetzel is Director, McKinsey Global Institute and Aaron Bielenberg is Expert Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company.