Dive Brief:
- 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) has partnered with the City of Boston to launch a three-day gathering on creating more equitable and resilient cities.
- Chief resilience officers and other officials from eight cities — Atlanta; Los Angeles; Louisville, KY; Manchester, England; New York; Seattle; Toronto and Tulsa, OK — are addressing and discussing potential solutions to racial disparity and systemic inequity. They will build on ideas put forth in Resilient Boston, focusing on ways local leaders can promote more equitable delivery of core services such as public transportation, affordable housing and economic opportunity.
- The group will produce a document to guide cities around the world on how to deal with the same issues.
Dive Insight:
Tackling large-scale issues like climate change, public transportation and economic opportunity is challenging. It's even more challenging to dig below the surface and uncover how a city's systemic racism and inequity could exacerbate existing issues.
Citizens who start out at a disadvantage are less resilient and have a harder time recovering from problems like a natural disaster or economic downturn.
"Cities can build resilience for all residents by confronting racial divisions and bias — which is known to lead to significant disparities in economic, social, and environmental outcomes, and disproportionate impacts after disasters,” Lori Nelson, Boston’s Chief Resilience Officer, said in a statement.
Identifying systemic racism and inequity and their impacts on a city isn't always easy. 100RC's gathering of chief resilience officers and other leaders both in and outside of government should help each city identify its own biases and what can be done to alleviate them and the greater problems they cause.
