It’s well known that 70% of people will live in cities by 2050. Urbanisation is accelerating, with millions flooding into metropolitan centres around the world. Yet cities are unable to withstand today’s climate challenges - let alone tomorrow’s. Already, extreme heat, rain, and flooding are pushing cities to breaking point.
What’s less well known is that, according to our best estimates, around 80% of the built environment of 2050 has already been built. So not only will cities be responsible for accommodating and protecting even more people, they’ll also have to do so with existing infrastructure and all of its associated vulnerabilities. Designed to withstand significantly lower thresholds of heat, water, and storm surge, these vulnerabilities are being exposed by today’s volatile weather. Tomorrow promises greater severity and frequency. Yet we are still under-informed about both the current resilience levels of our cities, their weak spots, and the likely weather patterns of the future.
To understand how cities are currently functioning, we must establish their baseline performance, and compare it against tomorrow’s demands using scenario modelling. This would allow us to properly test resilience. But existing scenario planning is not accurate enough. China’s record-breaking rainfall of 2021 was, according to existing scenario planning, a once in a millennium event, meaning that we are off by a factor of a hundred in terms of our predicted events and capacity in city systems like power, waste, and water. Without baseline data to inform investment, we cannot retrofit our urban environments to meet the requisite needs, and to design solutions accordingly.
Integration is the answer, and it will fundamentally change how we plan, operate, and conceive of our cities. Yet today’s siloed approach means that agencies that run cities - transport, health, education - are too divided. Different parameters and KPIs mean that they stress test their systems and assets independently of each other, making it harder to align in service of a greater togetherness. We must drive a holistic understanding and interdependencies and infrastructure assets of cities to ensure a joined up approach, which alone can yield the deeper resilience we need in the face of the challenges to come. That all depends on how we use innovation to collaborate and drive change.
Picture this
Scenario modelling must do more than illustrate threats. It must reveal how the interdependent systems synonymous with city life are impacted. Storm Sandy, which inundated New York City in 2012 with an unprecedented quantity of water, reveals how these impacts can cascade. Subways were flooded, cutting off suburban communities. All tunnels entering and exiting Manhattan were flooded, bar one. Power outages forced citizens to use private generators, which led to several deaths through carbon monoxide poisoning. The flooding of a telephone exchange disrupted voice and data communication, exacerbating isolation. Moreover, the social structures designed to support people were exposed as inadequate. And all this in one of the world’s richest, most well-organised cities.
From physical infrastructure through to utilities and social networks, cities are fundamentally interconnected. Damage to one area can quickly cascade into others, in unexpected ways. We must better understand how interdependencies align, clearly a gap in understanding those relationships from a holistic point of view; otherwise-solid plans will be undone if they’re not properly integrated with their wider context.
That’s why we need to run multiple scenarios simultaneously, exploring how initiatives or actions impact on other systems within the city in real time. Extreme weather events are best understood not as a monolithic entity, but as complex entities with distinct stages requiring different kinds of responses and adaptations. Plans and strategies must understand impact from start to peak to post, tailoring the response accordingly. That’s why we need an agile set of responses across this spectrum. Predictive modelling can establish vulnerabilities within infra or communities at each stage, so that we can focus on developing the right response to the right place at the right time.
For example, the true vulnerability of building infrastructure in proximity to sea level rises or flooding events may not be fully understood if our models consider floodwater alone. Hospitals may be built far from rising sea levels or flood-prone areas, but if their power depends on at-risk infrastructure, and their private generators do not last long enough, hospitals might be at much greater risk of collapse in such an event than is assumed. Our cities are systems; the resilience of one system depends on those with which it intersects, visibly or invisibly. Resilient planning evaluates these risks according to different scenarios, ensuring liaison between agencies to manage extreme weather events in tandem through a multi-agency approach. AtkinsRéalis has developed City Simulator, a scenario modelling tool able to assess multiple scenarios simultaneously, supporting an integrated approach.
Twentieth century blocks
The Middle East reveals the unique challenges of adapting cities for the emerging challenges. Whether founded on virgin land or existing metro areas like Riyadh and Dubai, the scale and growth of the Middle East’s cities is enormous and is matched by their speed. There’s an urgent need to diversify the economy and society from hydrocarbons, but this must be sustainably managed and localised, while taking into account the extremes of the environment. Otherwise, weaknesses may well be exacerbated as cities grow. In the UAE, 90% of food is imported and water depends on desalination. The vulnerabilities are clear, but addressing them requires careful evaluation and integration.
Moreover, many of the region’s existing cities grew largely in the late 20th century, when cars were in ascendency and cities were shaped around their use. Dubai’s gated and semi-gated communities demonstrate the unintended consequences. Residents all leave their developments at peak times, clogging transport systems. A dearth of community infrastructure encourages atomised individualism, impeding the kind of local grassroots initiative that mitigates impacts of disasters and speeds up recovery.
However, Dubai is learning its lessons very quickly. Dubai is delivering a public transport network through metros and bus systems, supplemented by rideshare and private car hire facilities. Moreover, Dubai is trying to stitch these together as a whole, promoting car-free cycle routes while improving provision of open space and green urban space to reduce heat island effect. The previous inclination for sprawl beyond city limits is being discouraged, in favour of a metropolitan area with distinct boundaries, taking advantage of existing infrastructure rather than more and more building.
Collaboration means community
Human wellbeing depends on togetherness, cooperation, and community. Yet cities have grown too atomised, lonely, and individualistic. The breakdown of community networks leave isolation and vulnerability in their wake, factors which exacerbate disasters and hamper recovery. Paris is creating small self-sufficient communities within communities, for greater cohesion, togetherness, and trust. This promotes a higher degree of self-responsibility, creating behaviours that aid recovery.
Security and safety depend on the community, and lives can be saved through vigilance and surveillance just by being better neighbours. ‘Soft’ interventions based upon behavioural change can yield disproportionate results. Technology, which often contributes to individualism, does not necessarily have to isolate us; through app-enabled community groups, exchanging information can enhance rather than replace face to face relationships. Empowering citizens to engage in how cities are run and are managed transform people and make them more resilient. Resilience starts and finishes at the local level.
Integration makes cities stronger and more resilient, but integration requires collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and jurisdictions. Collaboration, enabled by data, makes it possible. AtkinsRéalis’ breadth of subject matter experts, behavioural scientists, engineers, ecologists, planners, means that we can drive high performance solutions that are truly holistic. How we collect, analyse, and disseminate data can influence every other aspect. No one firm or discipline can find all the solutions, still less enact them. From virtual reality learning through to engineering, operations, and maintenance, data can enrich understanding and inform decision making, strengthening private and public resilience into our cities to drive better outcomes.
City lifeline
Standing still is not an option. The status quo is not good enough. Were we to continue building and running cities as we have done in the past, the ongoing rise in urbanisation will mean a concomitant rise in loneliness, isolation, and ill-health, will all their impacts for resilience. We have to change our cities, but we must also change how we do so. We simply don’t have time to follow traditional methodologies, which are too slow and incomplete. Resilience isn’t a discrete factor, but the fundamental factor enabling everything else.
From climate migration to financial investment, political stability to lifestyle, climate change will affect almost every aspect of urban life. Reactive, siloed responses can’t deliver real resilience. And with so much already built, neither can we continue with wasteful, sprawling approaches to urban design. Adaptation and maximisation of existing building stock will depend on things like building management systems, high performing facade design, and how to use assets to facilitate community growth. With collaboration powered by innovation, we can transform efficiently - but we must be willing to rethink our cities, from the ground up.
