Dear Ms. Hilary, thank you for your question.
You raised an interesting question becauseputtingthe vulnerable not only, as you asked, in the center of planning anddevelopment design but engaging them in these processes isquite challenging.
As a city member of the 100 resilient cities initiatives,we had the opportunity to know different examples of municipal governments whohave been successful on engaging vulnerable populations in resilience planning,where the human safety was the primary planning priority.
There are two examples that goes this way,one is the city of Porto Alegre who experiencing human-centric andterritorial perspectives on designing initiatives for improvingresilience, and the other one is the city of Christchurch in New Zealand hitby a massive earthquake. The city recovered much stronger by puttingcommunities affected at the heart of their planning efforts.
The city of Porto Alegre is well knowfor its ability of engage citizens, most of them vulnerable, forparticipating in the city budget expenditure planning but has been weak inthe ability to collaborate with them on building solutions together. The cityhoped that bringing communities to higher levels of engagement, especially withvulnerable groups, would improve decisions and solutions. Within the 100resilient cities initiative Porto Alegre is getting promising resultsengaging local leaders in the resilience strategy development, putting forwardinitiatives designed by their communities and giving support onthree pillars: capacity building, information access and networking.This strategy is allowing the city to incorporate small and importantvulnerable perspectives not usually considered in city planning.
When the city of Christchurch was hitby a sequence of earthquakes, it produced a devastating effect. Many commercialbuildings, schools, hospitals and a large number of homes were affected. Yet,the city was able to re-established essential functions andbounce-back rapidly by developing a resilience plan through a grassrootsparticipatory planning process that bound communities together and helpedthe city social and economically recover making Christchurch liveable again.