Less than three years after its launch, the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities programme has reached a notable landmark, with the announcement of its third and final tranche of members – taking this global initiative up to its full quota of 100 cities.

With fast-growing megacities such as Lagos, Jakarta, Seoul and Nairobi among the 37 revealed today in a joint launch in the Kenyan capital and Washington DC, the multimillion dollar programme looks to be tackling the most ambitious and difficult aspects of “building resilience” (a phrase describing the process of discovering how multiple shocks and stresses are interlinked and related).

“Incorporating resilience planning and principles not only prepares cities for disasters and long-term threats,” says Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which also supports Guardian Cities. “It also improves everyday living standards for all members of an urban community.”

A further eight American cities have joined the list today, including Washington DC, Seattle, Atlanta and Honolulu, meaning that, in all, one quarter of the 100 Resilient Cities are from the US. Three more Canadian cities – Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary – join Montreal in what has been a deliberate attempt to create mutually beneficial “hubs of experience” in certain countries around the world.

The moment just before cities are selected is probably the time you have most attention from a governor or mayor Michael Berkowitz

“In this third cohort, we largely went deeper in existing places rather than to new places,” explains Michael Berkowitz, the president of the 100RC programme. “In the United Kingdom, we have Manchester and Belfast joining Glasgow, Bristol, London – now that’s a real cohort. And now we’re talking to the prime minister’s office about how we might use the momentum that’s created to spread the programme further [within the UK].

Similarly, two more cities in Mexico – Colima and Guadalajara (Metro) – take its total quota to four (after Mexico City and Juárez), while Africa now boasts 10 cities in all, with Addis Ababa, Cape Town, Luxor and Paynesville in Liberia also being named today.

Speaking at a launch event in Nairobi, Cyvette Gibson, the mayor of Paynesville, described her city’s “significant challenges”. “Like many cities in Liberia that experienced rapid urbanisation after the civil conflict in the country, we grapple with issues such as high unemployment and scarcity of opportunity,” she said. “We also struggle to provide key services such as healthcare and education. This partnership will help us build resiliency and learn from other cities in the network to offer better services to our people.”

A different way

What comes over strongly from talking to Berkowitz is just how seriously the process is taken on all sides. He describes what he calls “whites-of-the-eyes” meetings, when the 100RC team have one final, cards-on-the-table discussion with a city’s governor or mayor before the decision to include, or not, is made.

“The moment just before cities are selected is probably the time you have most attention from a governor or mayor,” Berkowitz says, “so using that moment to have a frank, honest discussion of what this process really entails is crucial. Being able to poke your finger in the chest of a mayor or chief executive and say, ‘You’re thinking about this in the wrong way, why not look at it a different way?’ has proved very useful …”

Roadworks on a flyover in Pune, India, another of the final tranche of resilient cities. Photograph: Look Die Bildagentur/Alamy

For every city that has made it on to the final list, many more have been rejected during the assessment process. Since 2013, 100RC says it has received more than 1,000 applications to join the network, including 325 during this third round of appraisals.

For those cities now on board, the first key target is to identify and appoint a “chief resilience officer” (CRO) from within the city, whose salary will typically then be funded by the programme for two years. Thus far, more than 50 CROs have been appointed – but what’s their role in a nutshell?

“Cities, particularly the larger megacities, spend their whole day fighting fire,” Berkowitz says. “The idea of the CRO is to be the one person or office who has the luxury to think a little bit more strategically. We see the CRO as an integrator, that’s their explicit role.”

The next step is to create a “resilience strategy”; a blueprint for how the city plans to move to a more integrated, coherent way of tackling both sudden shocks and long-term urban pressures. To date, a dozen of the first two tranches of member cities have published theirs, from New York and New Orleans to the small Danish port city of Vejle.

“What the CRO and the resilience strategy both try to do is say: ‘Here’s the things that are priorities to us, and here’s how we can integrate this stuff,’” Berkowitz explains. “And in the process, we’re also seeing our CROs becoming magnets for other work that’s going on in their city.”

Berkowitz, who has previously worked in New York City’s Office of Emergency Management, is disarmingly realistic about what the 100RC programme has achieved to date, saying that today’s announcement “feels like the work is only just beginning”. (He’s certainly kept busy by it: after our meeting in London, he was straight off to Rotterdam for the launch of its resilience strategy, then on to Lagos, and then to Nairobi for one half of today’s launch.)

“The ultimate change we’re trying to see in cities – more cohesive communities, better infrastructure, more integrated planning, better mobility – these are things that happen over a generation, not just a couple of years. So one of the questions we’re asking now is how do you keep partnering with cities over an entire generation? Not just to 2020 but 2030, because that’s when we’ll see the kinds of change we’re really looking for.”

But three years and countless airmiles on from 100RC’s inception, Berkowitz says he is more convinced than ever that the programme can have a profound effect on its own – and other – cities, over the longer term at least.

“This agenda is blowing up all the time. Cities are the most important thing of our generation – they’re both our biggest risk and our greatest hope for solving all the big challenges of the world: sectarian conflict, climate threats, migration, cyber-security and so on.

“We are trying to ignite a revolution in the way cities view their risks and opportunities – but not only in the 100 member cities. By some accounts there are 10,000 cities in the world, and if cities are going to save the world, we can’t have 10,000 bespoke solutions. We’re using our 100 member cities as a first step – but ultimately we need to get all cities to understand that their differences are not that different. They need to come together.”

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