Making cities more resilient

As Forum’s work on cities shows, a sustainable future depends on how well cities can perform – as places to live, work and flourish (see our city-related projects:Megacities on the move, Sustainable urban enterprise, Sustainable cities index).

How far we are from turning the theory into practice is playing itself out in Japan right now. The human tragedy unfolding there is proving to be immense, with thousands feared dead and even more missing.

Homes and livelihoods have been destroyed, and scenes of heart-wrenching misery have mingled with images of acts of hopeless selflessness as we see people trying to rescue others from the advancing tsunami. We don’t know their fate for certain, but suspect that their lives have been lost too.

All this is rather personal for me, as one of our sons is currently in Toyko. While I listen to our UK government spokespeople talking soothingly about the low risks from the seemingly endless catastrophes at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant, my son is telling me (via Skype) thatstores are selling out of food, and that residents have been told to wear masks and not to drink tap water.

This may seem a small inconvenience compared to the people 150 miles further north – living around the plant (and now evacuated), or dealing with the loss of loved ones and homes. But it does demonstrate how vulnerable and non-resilient our towns and cities are. More than half the world’s people now live in urban areas, and Tokyo is a real-time demonstration of the breakdown of the current systems that make cities function.

Even though the Japanese capital is in an earthquake zone, the contingency planning for peoples’ responses disaster seems hopelessly inadequate. No wonder confidence in government’s ability to cope is low and people are taking things into their own hands as much as they can. Panic buying is a normal reaction of families under threat. To ask people not to do this demonstrates a total failure in understanding the psychology – the instincts – of people under stress. Further evidence that several levels of government are out of their depth.

Of course, the chances may be slim of an earthquake, a tsunami, varying degrees of failure at six out of six nuclear reactors (did you know that they can’t be switched off, that you don’t need to smash the containment vessel to sabotage a reactor, just cut off the coolant?) and bad weather happening concurrently. But it is these sorts of interconnected extreme events that we must prepare for if we are to cope with the outcomes of a dangerously changing climate. If Tokyo is not prepared, what about other cities – rich as well as poor?

My son has managed to get onto a flight this Friday, but I won’t rest until he is home. My husband (a cancer epidemiologist) assures me that post-Chernobyl, it was mainly children who were affected by the fall-out - that comes ascomfortto mefor our 35-year-old son, but not for the parents of children unable to move away from the danger zones.