Abstract
Urban planners seeking to enhance resilience contend with the complexity of interdependent systems and severe gaps in data and information. This complexity-capacity gap is most evident in smaller, rapidly growing cities. Experience in Africa shows these are also the cities where most risk is accruing and where the majority of population growth is felt. Bridging this gap to build resilience requires new decision-support tools that can operate on data that is not comprehensive but good enough. This paper examines the prospect for such a generation of tools to enable decisions that can build resilience that also enhance inclusive decision-making processes. It draws from the experience of the City Resilience Action Planning Tool, developed by UN-Habitat and shows how this or other similar tools can: build local government capacity; attract additional investment; contribute to longer-term processes of legislative reform; generate cooperation between communities and local government, and; work across power dynamics and open space for further collaboration.
Highlights
Urban planners seeking to enhance resilience contend with the complexity of interdependent systems and severe gaps in data and information
The Sus tainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda demand that no-one and no place are left behind. This global agenda highlights that support tools for urban planners that respond to the urban complexitycapacity gap need to respect the principles of inclusive decisionmaking and of development that can be informed by local priorities and knowledge
The growing complexity and spread of the African urban challenge are especially visible in small towns and intermediate cities where the distance required for catch-up and the speed of urban growth is most dramatic
Summary
Sub-Saharan Africa will experience the highest rates of urban pop ulation growth globally over the coming decades [2]. In the absence of adequate, affordable social or public housing processes, the urban poor, including vulnerable migrants tend to settle informally in hazard prone areas This results in a concentration of risks associated with inadequate disaster risk management, lack of access to basic services and critical infrastructure maintenance, within already weak urban planning and governance frameworks. In the face of these complex, interdependent challenges African city governments often face difficulties in owning planning processes aiming to reduce risk and promote sustainable urban development [3,6,7,8] This is a consequence of centralised policies and/or institutional architecture and lack of municipal finances, human resources, data and technical capacity with which to observe and understand complex, systemic urban processes. The local population is commonly disempowered largely due to the belief that they do not have the required understanding and knowledge to contribute meaningfully to a complex issue such as urban resilience planning, for example, or because their participation is seen as a hurdle to an investment objective
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