Cities for a Resilient Recovery: International Lessons on recovery from COVID-19 / 2 July 2020

Produced by The University of Manchester, UK (Professor Duncan Shaw, Dr Jennifer Bealt, and Professor Ruth Boaden) in partnership with the Global Resilient Cities Network (Sam Kernaghan)

What is the weekly briefing on Cities for a Resilient Recovery?

Each week the University of Manchester brings together relevant international practices and examples on recovery from COVID-19. The weekly briefing is curated by the Global Resilient Cities Network to bring key lessons and examples targeted for resilience officers, emergency planners and other city practitioners. The structure of the briefing follows the City Resilience Framework – specifically the four drivers that cities have been identified as mattering the most when a city faces chronic stresses or sudden shocks - Health and Wellbeing, Economy & Society; Infrastructure & Environment; and Leadership & Strategy.

Highlights of the week

In this week’s briefing we focus on how existing urban systems provide for (or not) inclusive access to those things that individuals, households and communities need to survive and thrive in a post-COVID recovery, and the role affected communities can play, building on their lived experience to inform local, place based recovery.

Residents of informal settlements depend on extremely frail systems to meet basic needs. In response and recovery, experience from Ebola and Cholera outbreaks in cities like Accra, Ghana, have shown that utilising community knowledge, information and networks to understand information about the area, is critical for designing robust interventions, from public health campaigns to infrastructure investments.

Many households in countries such as El Salvador and Nepal are dependent on remittances from family members as a main source of income. Disruption to the sending and receiving of the remittances has implications for the immediate needs of those households and the wider communities, as well as the agents whose livelihoods depend on these transactions.

Integrated and flexible water management is critical to enabling drinking water access and supply, food production, and mitigating the potential impacts of drought and food shortages. Through recovery, cities need to overcome constraints on movement of workers and citizens in order to improve water management in urban and peri-urban environments and reduce inequality of access.

And there are clear benefits of including those affected by COVID-19 in recovery planning. For instance: enabling better decision-making that is based on evidence and data; increased transparency; support for improved social inclusion and cohesion; and equality. This inclusive and reflective approach also enables services to ensure the needs of individuals affected are central to the decisions that are made for future delivery of response and recovery action