Building resilient cities Investing in Plan B

Building resilient cities: Investing in Plan BAs South Australia mops up after the superstorm which cut power to 1.7 million people, how do we secure the resilience of our systems and our cities?More than 80,000 lightning strikes hit key parts of the state’s electricity network, strong winds buckled 22 regional transmission towers and, for some, days of chaos ensued. Trams stopped in their tracks, productivity ground to a halt, traffic was gridlocked, buses caught on fire because their engines seized in the congestion, and 19 people were trapped in lifts throughout Adelaide’s CBD.While the political blame game continues, the economic costs are still being counted.”It was genuinely the perfect storm – a massive economic hit to South Australia, and an even bigger hit to confidence,” says the Property Council’s executive director in South Australia, Daniel Gannon.”If you are an investor looking to inject capital into a city, you need reliable power. The resilience of a city to these sorts of shocks, and the impact they can have on your investment capabilities, is something that international investors will be considering.”Beck Dawson is Sydney’s chief resilience officer- a role funded by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of the 100 Resilient Cities program. She says South Australia’s experience last week serves as a reminder of how one incident can lead to a domino effect.”Around the world we are seeing cities experience similar challenges. As our cities become increasingly efficient, they become more susceptible to key shocks such as catastrophic infrastructure failure as we saw in South Australia.”Dawson says the hallmark of a resilient city is its ability to bounce back quickly when things go wrong, and to do that, we need to ensure we have capacity within our systems.”When we talk about the definition of urban resilience, this is about building cities that can adapt, thrive and survive under both chronic stresses and acute shocks – and that means building back redundancy and having other options ready to go when we’re hit with an acute shock.”Gannon says the underlying lesson for cities around Australia is to invest in Plan B. “Workers in a number of buildings throughout Adelaide’s CBD were unaware of the blackout until a few hours in because their owners had invested in generators. We need to be looking at how we ensure the entire state has a reliable Plan B so that this doesn’t happen again.”