Urban resilience: How Asian cities face slow-moving threats

Jonas Jörin, co-director of the Future Resilient Systems program at the ETH-Singapore center in Singapore, identified a few other challenges fast-growing cities face.

The cascading effect of a single disruption

While the cities offer enormous economic opportunities, which is their main pull factor, there is a disconnect between where food and water comes from -rural areas- and where they are consumed -the city. The lack of food and water security in the cities is a challenge to their resilience.
Growing cities cause very small pieces of land to hold enormous amounts of public and private assets. This makes cities vulnerable.

Resilience is not a theory. It’s a concept, deciding how we respond to, recover and learn from, and deal with disruptions.

To achieve resilience, we need to understand how a single disruption can have a cascading effect on other systems. For example, if a car crashes into an electricity box, this can lead to a power outage. That, in turn could lead to water pumps that stop working, which could cause flooding.

Connect information

These types of interdependencies are being researched in virtual cities now. The next step is to take this research to the field.
There is an enormous potential to connect information, to make use of available technologies to improve the ability to detect, predict, and manage ambiguous events and situations. And it’s necessary to develop foresight capabilities and resilience-oriented mindsets.
 

Supachai Tantikom was the first Chief Resilience Officer of Bangkok, Thailand. He defines urban resilience as the capacity of communities, institutions, and businesses to deal with urbanization, climate change, and globalization.

Two-hour commutes and flooded streets

Population growth is putting a heavy toll on Bangkok. Six million people are registered as official residents, paying taxes. The local government, however, must fund infrastructure and other services for an estimated 12 million people who use Bangkok as place to work or live.

That poses significant challenges, meaning Bangkok is faced with everyday stresses like bad air quality and unforgiving traffic jams. Supachai’s daily commute takes him 1.5-2 hours each way.

The priority stress challenging Bangkok’s resilience now is ever-increasing flooding. Heavy rain is overrunning the drainage system, which had been built to deal with downpours of up to 60 millimeters an hour, but now must regularly process 120 millimeters an hour.

Lacking an alternative city

Bangkok revises its city planning every five years, yet if nothing more fundamental changes, in fifty years the metropolis will be in more trouble than it is now. Especially since Thailand lacks a proper second city alternative. Everyone eventually wants to move to Bangkok for university, a better job, or one of the other main pull factors. This creates an additional slow-moving stress which weighs down on the city’s future resilience.

Historian Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the chair for the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zurich.

Forgetting history

She discovered in her research of over a decade in and around Kolkata, India, that much of the problems of urban planning come from forgetting history.

For some centuries now, people have thought about how to build in the marshes of the Bengal Delta. This meant plotting the coastline, deciding where land ends and water begins. And dealing with a landscape that’s mobile: what’s dry in the morning, can be underwater in the afternoon.

People used to know how to live with this, but that’s been forgotten. Airports are built on former wetlands, office buildings rise on marshland, causing them to tilt so much that, like in Bangalore, elevators don’t work anymore.

Sudden shocks become chronic stresses

Meanwhile, governments and organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change continue to produce reports that get completely ignored. That’s why the water has become a threat to resilience.

We have now come to a juncture, as typhoons occur so often and are so severe that they should no longer be seen as sudden shocks but as chronic stresses, that we cannot afford to forget the history of how to live along coastlines -where most cities are- anymore.

Start doing, instead of thinking

The determination to solve all problems at once can be limiting. Thinking too big risks us being stuck in thinking instead of doing. To increase the resilience of megacities, it could be good to just start doing things on a small scale, says Gerry Lemcke, head Product Management, Public Sector Solutions at Swiss Re.

Private party capital is very happy to invest, but shy of unwanted risks. That’s where the (re)insurance industry can step in. Once you find that a solution works on a small scale, you have a proof that can attract capital to start doing that same thing somewhere else.

Technology can help, but also adds risk

Digital data can help cities do more with the infrastructure that is already there, says Jan Bieser, senior researcher at the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute. Monitoring traffic flows, for example, can help to steer traffic better, allowing for the same road to be used by more vehicles.

However, technology is itself another layer of infrastructure that, just like a drainage system or roads, can fail. The more dependent systems become on technology, the more risk they run.

Tech itself will never change something. It has to be tech plus policy.

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