Page 24 - Asia Speaks

10) URBAN RESILIENCE
by Muhamad Qamar Rahman Bin Md Isa
In this 21st century, cities in the world are growing and facing a range of adversities and
challenges. All cities are vulnerable to severe impacts from both natural and human-made. Today, throughout the whole world , rapid urbanization, climate change and political instability are the challenge factors in the cities. Resilience is what helps the cities to adapt and transform those challenges to prepare for both the expected and the unexpected situation.
Urban resilience is the capacity of the urban system, communities, individuals, organizations and even the governments to address all of the challenges and maintain their function and thrive after the impacts (100RC, 2019). By addressing the theme of Sustainable Asia, urban resilience is a concept to achieve sustainable growth in fair
22
and equitable distribution, across income groups, ethnicity and supply chains among Asian regions.
The centre for urban resilience is the cities, wherefrom UN-Habitat (2019) by 2050 estimates that 70% or more of the population will live in cities. From this prediction, 60% of new urban settlements are yet to be built in representing a huge opportunity to everyone. From this data, the focus is on how to make cities more sustainable in terms of consumption, living conditions and socio-environment footprint.
Cities need to mobilise their capacities to adapt or transform from current stressful situations that challenged urban resilience to new states of higher resilience. Urban resilience can be viewed from a few perspectives. The first dimension is people resilience that focuses more
on individuals and communities. In this first perspective, social project, entrepreneurship, youth development and community building are the main aspects of urban resilience. The second perspective is the places’ resilience, focuses on technology and infrastructures. Next, urban ecosystems that focus on natural capital and ecoscapes of the cities. The last perspective is governance capital, which focuses on institutions, partnership and the rules and laws by the government. (Urbact, 2016) In a nutshell, urban resilience is a guiding principle can elucidate ways to restore, create and advance Asian regions’ cities for a better future. Thus, the new ways of resilience thinking of cities are required, to also include the on-going emerging and planned processes that contribute to this aspiration.