I want to build a new neighbourhood

Design for resilience

 Resilience is the ability of a system to bounce or spring back into shape, position, etc. after being pressed or stretched. The opposite of resilience is brittleness or rigidity. Resilience in systems arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore the system even after a large perturbation. A single balancing loop brings a system back to its desired state. Resilience is provided by several such loops, operating through different mechanisms, at different time scales, and with redundancy – one kicking in if another one fails.

Cities can be seen as hot spots of vulnerability, especially where a large part of the population lives in poverty. Low-income and vulnerable urban dwellers, such as women, children, the elderly, migrants and people with disabilities, are particularly at risk and are also more susceptible to shocks. However, urban areas present also opportunities to improve resilience: high population density means that local governments can provide critical infrastructure, such as water and energy supply, at a lower per capita cost than in rural areas.

Challenges and Opportunities

 Transport systems form the lifeline of economic and social development of cities – they enable economic, social and cultural exchange and connect urban centers to the bioregion and the rest of the country. As fast-growing cities face a massive influx of people into urban centers, the mobility of people and goods has become one of the most pressing concerns of city leaders and policy makers. The situation is already untenable in many cities, with local air pollution reaching dangerous levels for human health and traffic congestion costing as much as 8 percent of cities’ total GDP in some urban centers (Centre for Economics and Business Research 2014). The increases in global vehicle ownership and overall distances people travel fuel the demand for oil which, according to Asian Development Bank (2008) estimates, will be three times more in 2030 than it was in 2007.

Transportation produces about 23 percent of global CO₂ emissions from fuel combustion[1] (IEA 2017 c). More alarmingly, the transport sector is the fastest growing consumer of fossil fuels and the fastest growing source of CO₂ emissions. With rapid urbanization in developing countries, energy consumption and CO₂ emissions from urban transport are increasing rapidly. Emissions increased by 2.5 percent per year between 2010 and 2015 (IEA 2017c). This calls for shifting towards sustainable transport solutions: systems that are low-carbon, emphasize quality of life and yet foster economic growth. New analysis suggests that the world’s 724 largest cities could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) annually by 2030, primarily through transformative change in transport systems (The Global Commission on the Economy and Climate 2014).

[1] GHGs from transport come from fuel used during motorized journeys. Increasing the level of economic activity in a city generally results in an increase in the total number of trips. These trips are distributed over the range of available modes (called modal split), depending on the competitiveness of the alternatives for a given trip maker. Each motorized trip emits GHG emissions and the quantity of emissions depends largely on the amount and intensity of GHGs of the fuel used. Finally, driver behavior affects fuel consumption as after certain threshold speeds, fuel consumption increases considerably.