A year ago, Hurricane Sandy left a trail of flames, death and destruction from Jamaica to Canada, killing at least 286 people and costing more than $65 billion damage to the United States alone. The storm was particularly damaging to the New York metropolitan area, which had been spared a major meteorological disaster for generations – entire communities from the New Jersey Atlantic coastline up through Staten Island and Queens, and the south shore of Long Island were nearly destroyed. A full year later, the rebuilding continues.
But thanks to an innovative initiative called 100 Resilient Cities, created by the Rockefeller Foundation and launched with a $100 million commitment at last month’s Clinton Global Initiative in New York, the future survivors of major disasters around the world may awake the day after a storm to better infrastructure and resilient public services. The partnership – which includes insurer Swiss Re Swiss Re, the American Institute of Architects, Architecture for Humanity, and data analysis firm Palantir – will support at least 100 cities to hire a Chief Resilience Officer, create a resilience strategy, and provide access to tools, technical support, and resources for implementation including access to innovative finance for infrastructure development. A new organization, 100 Resilient Cities, will also create a network for CROs to share information and best practice.
Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said that more than 500 cities around the world had submitted applications to take part in the program – the first cities chosen will be announced in December.
The world is rapidly urbanizing. By 2050, 75% of the world’s population will live in cities, and in many developing regions entire economies are both fragile – and lie within coastal areas that are exceedingly vulnerable to major storms. In the United States, as we saw a year ago, economic vulnerability is also clear. Said Rodin: 23 of the nation’s most densely populated counties lie along the ocean coastlines. “These ‘once in 100 years’ storms now strike with regularity. No longer are these things unusual,” she said.
In an op-ed piece this week, Rodin acknowledged that disasters don’t end at municipal borders and that the problem of urban centers and catastrophic risk is a global one. “True resilience is not a city-by-city effort,” she wrote. “Today, one city’s resilience is inextricably bound up with the region – and the rest of the world. We need to think about resilience on both a regional and a global scale.”
In the U.S., Architecture for Humanity plans to open five domestic “Regional Resiliency Design Studios” to serve as working hubs to help implement resiliency projects for cities. Said AFH executive director Cameron Sinclair: “a lot of the mistakes are the same – we’re going to share those mistakes.”
New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, who represented the city along with political consultant and commentator James Carville at CGI, spoke about the tribulations that great city faced – and the lessons it’s learned.
“We almost lost an entire American city and people gasped at the extent of the damage,” he said. “[The hurricane] eviscerated the city and people asked, ‘what’s wrong with the people of New Orleans?’ People thought we did something wrong. But we’re really the canary in the coal mine.”
That’s why resilience and planning matter, he said. Building resilience into all aspects of planning makes urban communities better able to withstand a catastrophic shock. With 165 levees in danger of failing (or failed) and an average of 17 feet of water in half a million homes, New Orleans showed what an catastrophe in this country looked like – and it was portrait complicated by race and poverty. “New Orleans is the most immediate laboratory for innovation and change,” said Landrieu. Its lessons “are immediately transferrable…people just can’t uproot and move.”
This week, we checked in with American Institute of Architects CEO Robert Ivy on the anniversary of Sandy, which has left pockets within one of the world’s wealthiest and most highly-developed regions struggling a full year later. “In our industry, we know that every $1 spent on mitigation saves $4 on post-disaster recovery,” he said. “We are used to hearing the statistics on a large scale … Over $100 billion spent in 2012 and 2013… Over $1 trillion in assets at risk of coastal flooding…
“But it is at the local level — in cities — where resilience will be achieved. At the Clinton meeting, we announced a program to open five regional resiliency centers across the United States in those areas most affected by disaster. Our goal is to be ready before the cameras arrive and to stay long after they’re gone.”