OECD Resilient Cities

The report Resilient Cities: Policy Highlights,  published by OECD is a brief summary of preliminary findings of the OECD project on Resilient Cities, published in June 2016. This report investigates how cities can increase their resilience in order to have the ability to absorb, recover and prepare for future shocks.

The report is structured into 4 sections:

1. What are “resilient cities’? This chapter attempts to develop a framework for resilient cities, providing a working definition of a resilient city, the drivers of resilience in order to better identify what resilience looks like in an urban context, and the policy mechanisms that could be of benefit.
2. How to measure resilience? This chapter aims at defining some benchmarks and indicators in order to be able to measure a city’s resilience.
3. How to enhance drivers of resilience? This part includes the policy actions taken by city governments, as well as their collaboration with national governments. These strategies can be either horizontal (adaptive, robust, redundant, flexible, resourceful, inclusive & integrated strategies) or strategies for specific shocks and stresses (e.g. energy and natural disasters)
4. How cities try to be more resilient? This part explores experiences of case studies of cities in building their resilience. The cities that are included in the investigation are:

• Antalya (Turkey),
• Belo Horizonte (Brazil)
• Bursa (Turkey)
• Cardiff (UK)
• Kobe (Japan)
• Kyoto (Japan)
• Lisbon (Portugal)
• Oslo (Norway)
• Ottawa (Canada)
• Tampere   (Finland)

Investing in areas such as industrial diversification, innovation, infrastructure, compact urban forms, community network development and capacities for public sector will enhance cities’ resilience.

Report findings

The main findings of this preliminary version of the project are the following:

• Resilient cities can bounce back using the lessons learnt from their past experiences, taking a long term perspective and making the best use of their local resources.
• Cities are taking innovative approaches to respond to those challenges on resilience. 10 case study cities of the project show innovative examples, such as open innovation policies, citizen engagement, diversifying industrial structure, undertaking compact city policies and forming alliance of cities and universities.
• Cities are undertaking a participatory approach, inviting diverse actors on board, such as citizens and universities. They are not only the recipient of public services, but they are the providers of their knowledge and experiences to have better public policies.

• Download the Policy highlights report here (preliminary version)
• Download the Resilient Cities Framework presentation
• Further information for the project