City Resilience

100 Resilient Cities (100RC) was a program sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation aimed at helping one hundred cities around the world to become more resilient and create strategies that would prepare them for the future. Louisville and Minneapolis were two of the cities who received a grant by 100RC. Each city required a strategy partner (consulting firm) to help shape the process. The strategy partner (or planning team) had access to a series of community engagement tools created by various groups specifically for the 100RC program. The tools and exercises were standard across award cities with room for creativity and flexibility. They were highly successful at providing a resilience diagnose of each city. Below are examples of those tools.

The City Resilience Framework

The City Resilience Framework (CRF) was developed by Arup with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Following extensive research, it is intended to provide a diagnose of cities resilience state based on a series of drivers that contribute to it. This exercise helped cities like Louisville and Minneapolis have a better understanding of their current state, the areas where improvement was necessary, and the potential actions that could help them achieve resilience.

The CRF has four dimensions (Leadership and Strategy, Health and Wellbeing, Infrastructure and Environment, and Economy and Safety), twelve drivers, and fifty one sub-drivers.

This framework was used to engage stakeholders in small group settings. Each group was given a series of color dots that represented whether a particular area needed improvement or not. The results are then tallied and correlated with other inputs from stakeholders to identify areas of action.

CRF adapted for the City of Louisville’s engagement process

Stakeholders participate in the CRF exercise in Louisville during the Agenda Setting Workshop

The Shocks and Stresses exercise

Shocks are acute, one-time events while stresses are chronic. They both weaken the fabric of a city. And it is often the case that a shock will exacerbate the effects of a stress. For example, extreme rainfall (a shock) often affects disproportionally the most vulnerable in a city (poverty: a stress).

In this exercise, stakeholders are given cards with prepopulated shocks and stresses that are common to cities (shocks were written on red cards, and stresses on blue cards). Blank cards were also provided. Participants then place this card in four-quadrant poster. The four quadrans are:

  1. High likelihood and high consequence

  2. High likelihood and low consequence

  3. Low likelihood and high consequence

  4. Low likelihood and low consequence

The cards placed in quadrant one reveal the cities top shocks and stresses.

Stakeholders engaged in the Shocks and Stresses exercise during the Agenda Setting Workshop in Louisville

Louisville’s Resilience Strategy: Shocks and Stresses

Minneapolis Resilience Strategy: Shocks and Stresses