City officials, and real estate and land professionals need to take some bold steps to address the risk cities face from hurricanes and other extreme weather events
City officials, and real estate and land professionals need to take some bold steps to address the risk cities face from hurricanes and other extreme weather events.
A new report from the Urban Land Institute's Center for Sustainability and Economic Performance outlines ten fundamental principles for building resilient cities and regions.
The guidelines highlight how cities can be anticipate, respond to and recover from unexpected weather events, and longer-term effects of climate change.
The Ten Principles for Building Resilience are:
- Understand vulnerabilities
- Strengthen job and housing opportunities
- Promote equity
- Leverage community assets
- Redefine how and where to build
- Build the business case
- Accurately price the cost of inaction
- Design with natural systems
- Maximize co-benefits; and
- Harness innovation and technology.
"These ten principles and their supporting, specific strategies empower decision-makers to integrate resilience into all aspects of community building,” said former ULI Global Chairman Marilyn Jordan Taylor, a ULI governing trustee and professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. “From adequately pricing the cost of risk and inaction to investing in green infrastructure that creates multiple benefits to harnessing the power of innovative technologies to respond to crises and recover, this report provides a playbook for communities on the path to becoming more resilient."
The private real estate sector’s investment in more resilient buildings and infrastructure is a key theme discussed in the report.
"The concept of the business case —the proof of return on the individual and collective investment—is a powerful tool to guide decision-making and assemble the resources to rebuild homes, businesses, and infrastructures of water, transport, and communications upon which the well-being of communities relies," Taylor noted.
