Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo and 100 Resilient Cities have officially unveiled the city’s new Resilience Strategy. The launch came after the Paris City Council unanimously approved the Strategy on 25th September 2017.
The city’s first Resilience Strategy is a roadmap to better prevent and adapt Paris to the challenges of the 21st century, which include extreme climate events such as major floods or heat waves; terrorist threats; and long-term chronic stresses such as poor air quality, scarcity of resources, or the migration crisis.
Led by Paris Chief Resilience Officer Sébastien Maire and his team, the Resilience Strategy proposes an integrated approach, including residents, public institutions, and the private sector.
The Paris Resilience Strategy contains 35 actions, organized around three key pillars:
- An inclusive and supportive city, which supports its residents, prepares them to face major crises and the difficulties of everyday life, and invites them to collaboratively provide input for future decision-making. Among the key actions of this pillar, the Strategy foresees the setting up of solidarity and voluntary citizens’ networks in all districts to help crisis management, the deployment of a large training system for first aid, and facilitating the occupancy of urban spaces by the inhabitants for festivities and temporary projects of celebration and solidarity.
- A city developed and built to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, notably by anticipating risks and adapting infrastructures to climate risk, changing needs, and uses. The actions of this pillar concentrate on the evolution of how infrastructure is built, management of the city in the face of major floods or repeated heat waves, proposing to design modular public spaces and facilities capable of accommodating uses or to develop new uses (basements, roofs, etc.).
- A city that mobilizes collective intelligence and cooperates with other territories, particularly rural ones, by promoting innovative partnerships to better understand risks, prepare for and promote the development of a local and circular economy, as well as short and environmentally friendly mobility. This pillar foresees the creation of a resource and resilience research platform, collaboration with digital and innovation actors to generate shared knowledge, and strengthening the resilience of municipal government, with a focus on IT and digital infrastructure.
“Faced with the great challenges of the 21st century, and above all climate change, we have a duty to anticipate. The very functioning of our city must be questioned: our flexibility, our ability to learn from past crises to better anticipate those that may arise, our capacity to think systemically in order to multiply the benefits. This is the objective of this Resilience Strategy, which we had to build with inhabitants, associations, companies and researchers, in a very horizontal and very agile approach. This collective work will continue with the implementation of the 35 chosen actions that aim to offer Parisians the best possible future,” said Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris.
“Throughout its history, Paris has demonstrated its capacity to emerge from events such as the centennial flood of 1910 or the terrorist attacks of 2015, demonstrating the tremendous resilience of the city and its inhabitants,” said Michael Berkowitz, President of 100 Resilient Cities. “During the development of this Strategy, Paris was able to interact with other cities that are members of the 100RC network, including New Orleans, Rotterdam, Athens, Bangkok and Santiago de Chile. This sharing of experiences is all the more important as many issues are shared between these cities.”
