Rockefeller’s 100 Resilient Cities – a personal journey

Last week I went to a talk hosted by Melbourne Conversations and the Resilient Melbourne Initiative.  The president of Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) programme was the main speaker, and it led to an interesting discussion on the challenges that Melbourne is facing.

I was involved in the development of the Cities Resilience Index (CRI) when I was in Cape Town and I’ve written a bit about this before.  The CRI is a tool that can be used to assess a city’s resilience, and help to highlight where they may be vulnerable, and it was a project that was running in parallel to the 100RC programme.  So this is close to my heart.

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It became even more personal this morning when I had a look through the 100RCs and realised that I had been to 15 of them.  So over the next while I will be casting my mind back to these 15 cities, talking about my experience (where I can remember them) and what kind of resilience priorities these cities have.

Once this is done, perhaps I will carry on, and look at some of the cities I haven’t yet been to.  Maybe starting with cities where those close to me have travelled.

So far, my travels have taken me to these cities looking to improve their resilience:

1. Bangkok
2. Barcelona
3. Belgrade
4. Cape Town (yay)
5. Da Nang
6. Durban
7. London
8. Melaka
9. Melbourne
10. Montreal
11. New York City
12. Singapore
13. Sydney
14. Thessaloniki
15. Toronto

You can see the full list of cities here.