Redesigning Our Cities Will Shift Us from Urban Fragility to Resilience

Cities are key to our surviving the twenty-first century. If we design them right, we just might make it. We get them wrong, and humanity is in deep trouble. The biggest challenges are not just faced by the world´s global cities in advanced economies, but especially in fast-growing urban agglomerations in Africa and Asia where 90% of future population is set to take place. A precondition to moving from fragile to resilient cities in the coming decades is good information.

Join us as we review the global threats to our cities and explore some of the strategies urbanites are deploying to address them. We will explore a Big Data visualization that tracks literally dozens of climate and anthropomorphic risks. In this session you will:

• Better understand how fragility is affecting thousands of cities, especially in the Global South where most urban population growth is taking place;
  
• Explore a number of climate-related challenges facing cities such as drought, rising sea levels, and deforestation;
  
• Examine trends in rapid urbanization, migration and political violence in cities around the world; and
  
• Review key design principles that can help build cities that both mitigate and adapt to gravest challenges of our era