Page 16 - Asia Speaks

4) URBAN RESILIENCE by Nachatira Thuraichamy
Over half of the world’s population lives in cities; by 2050, the percentage is projected to
1
increase to 70%. Due to cities’ high population
densities, their function as capital sinks, their role in the global and local economies and the fact that most of the world’s largest cities are situated in coastal areas, it is only natural that climate change-related events will be experienced most severely by humans there.2 With the exponential increase in urban population rises challenges that policymakers, governments and society must be resilient to.
Urban resilience refers to the ability of cities to respond to unpredictable urban threats like natural disasters and human actions based on their abilities to resist, recover, adapt and transform. What was initially considered ‘freak events’ like extreme droughts, flooding of cities from extreme rainfall and heat waves that increase urban mortality rates have rapidly become regular events.3
1 World Cities Report (2016). World Cities Report. doi:10.18356/d201a997-en
2 Northcutt, J. F., Clark, B., & Dawson, A. (2019). Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change. Journal of World-Systems Research, 25(2), 496-499. doi:10.5195/jwsr.2019.937
3 Hoornweg, D., Freire, M., Lee, M. J., Bhada-Tata, P., & Yuen, B. (2011). In- troduction: Cities and the Urgent Challenges of Climate Change. Cities and Climate Change, 1-13. doi:10.1596/9780821384930_ch01
14
Despite the emphasis on the Global North in the research literature, there has been an increase in collaboration and partnerships between Asian and ASEAN countries on this subject. For example, the ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response Work Programme 2016 - 2020 aims to increase the resilience of ASEAN cities to disasters through regional cross-sectoral collaboration and the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction has further increased partnerships between countries in the Global South. While these frameworks form an essential infrastructure to urban resilience governance, in isolation, they are inadequate.
From an urban political-ecological perspective, it is essential also to consider the multi-faceted issues that often underlie discourses on urban disasters. For example, Danny Marks4 argues that the depoliticisation of the 2011 floods in Bangkok ignored the fact while there was an above-average rainfall that year, it was, in
4 Marks, D. (2015). The Urban Political Ecology of the 2011 Floods in Bang- kok: The Creation of Uneven Vulnerabilities. Pacific Affairs, 88(3), 623-651. doi:10.5509/2015883623