Resilience is the ability to rebound from hardships and setbacks. Currently, natural disasters are predicted to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change, pressuring cities to face and overcome these threats. The Resilient City is one of six themes at this year’s WDCD Mexico City on 6, 7 & 8 May.
As cities are increasingly vulnerable to the threat of natural disasters, such as earth quakes, floods, heat waves and wind storms, they need to be built with resilience in mind. This is worth the investment, according to the US National Institute of Building Sciences, for each one dollar invested in prevention, four dollars can be saved in disaster response costs.
At WDCD Mexico City, architects, politicians, designers, entrepreneurs and more will be unearthing design solutions for city resilience. Here are some of the featured speakers who will be sharing their inspiring stories on this theme.
Power in Numbers
Taking things in their own hands, cities are not just relying on national governments to move forward to react to climate change. For example, Minister of Foreign Affairs in Mexico and WDCD Mexico City speaker Marcelo Ebrard, organized a World Mayors Summit on Climate Change in Mexico in 2010. Under his leadership, this event resulted in the Global Cities Covenant on Climate, a pact signed by 250 cities across the globe.
Live the Context
At the forefront of social innovation, community development and sustainable construction, Cameron Sinclair – upcoming speaker at WDCD Mexico City – has four areas of focus: Plan for nomadic design, build for impermanence, build for adaption and scale via a sharing economy.
‘Most importantly for me, a designer shouldn’t visit the context, they should live the context’, says Sinclair. ‘If you’re not willing to live in the shelter you’re designing, then you’re not an architect. You have to be able to say “we need to design with dignity”, and the only way to design with dignity is your own background.’
Tracy Metz
The City Environment
Also joining WDCD Mexico City to share their visions, are journalist Tracy Metz and design innovator Anna van Nunen from the Netherlands ‘Today more than half of the world population lives in cities,’ says Metz, author of Sweet & Salt: Water and the Dutch.
‘Relatively that number keeps rising. That makes city life around the world an actual topic.’ Whereas Van Nunen enables innovating and validating design in a small scale city-like environment like a music festival before scaling up. With roughly 50,000 cities worldwide, it’s necessary to share and scale up designs to build resilience.