Urban Resilience is often considered as the capacity an infrastructure has to sustain itself in the face of incoming threats to the integrity of cities worldwide. These considerations are crucial when weighing the impact of disastrous events such as floods, earthquakes or typhoons and their effects on cities. As argued by Véronique Peyrache-Gadeau and Bernard Pecqueur (2011), cities on all continents will be facing more of such events, thus prompting the need to find solutions and devise development policies that put the welfare of urbanites first.
In past decades, new chronic strains have started looming over cities leaving many observers concerned as to what may happen to unprepared systems of urban organisation. These issues are less brutal than the natural disasters mentioned above but their consequences are more concerning should they spiral out of control. These issues are related to epidemics, wide-spread urban violence or social discontent related to high levels of unemployment and the inefficiency of basic urban services such as the provision of electricity or public transportation services. As indicated by Laurie Boschetti, Damienne Provitolo & Emmanuel Tric (2017), these events may seem dissimilar to floods and droughts at first sight but they do share similar attributes insofar as they are “hardly predictable and localisable precisely [and] brutal in their outbreak”. Urban Resilience is in fact not solely to be considered as related to the state of the concrete structures that hold a city’s infrastructure together but also as a socio-economic ecosystem that allows urbanites to live collectively and serenely in increasingly populous cities.
Contemporary conceptualisations of Urban Resilience are therefore to consider the traditional approach alongside socio-economic imperatives from which future urban challenges will surface. These considerations are yet to be fully embraced by governing bodies throughout the world, but future urban challenges will have to be addressed by a wider range of actors, namely public, civic and private, in interrelated fields of actions such as infrastructure, the economy and the social.
Véronique Peyrache-Gadeau et Bernard Pecqueur, « Villes durables et changement climatique : quelques enjeux sur le renouvellement des « ressources urbaines » », Environnement Urbain, Volume 5, 2011, web : http://journals.openedition.org/eue/723
– Laurie Boschetti, Damienne Provitolo & Emmanuel Tric, « La modélisation conceptuelle comme aide à la construction de villes résilientes », Risques urbains, Volume 1, 2017, web : https://www.openscience.fr/La-modelisation-conceptuelle-comme-aide-a-la-construction-de-villes-resilientes
Better finance to invest more
Strong participation from the international financial community, multilateral, bilateral donors, private banks, and investment funds is expected. The exchanges will be open to many actors to invent new forms of partnerships, new business models thanks to collaborations between the public and private sectors.
The General Secretary for the 2020 Africa-France Summit is thrilled to announce one of its very first Strategic Partnership with Meridiam, one of France’s leading voice in the financing of sustainable projects throughout the world.
The General Secretariat for the 2020 Africa-France Summit is pleased to announce that Standard Bank, one of the Africa’s leading banking group, has officialised its participation to the 2020 Africa-France Summit at a Strategic level of partnership