73
Through a USAID-funded project in St. Petersburg,
residents have united in an eco-group—a small
sustainable community. In the basement of their
building they breed California worms that produce
compost, which they use for growing vegetables on
the roof. | Photo: Dmitry Feklisov
2100, transforming them “into ovens,” in the
words of one Bank economist.
1
Cities provide rural-urban migrants with
opportunities, but also intensify the challenges
they face on an individual level, and magnify and
accelerate shocks transmitted throughout the global
system. Centralized city planning has long focused
on top-down approaches to “solving” individual
urban problems. Urban resilience interventions,
on the other hand, should focus at the community
level, with a holistic view of enhancing a range of
community capacities (including the economy,
social networks, and human and institutional skills)
for ongoing adaptation and innovation. Urban
resilience similarly must be based in the recognition
of the interactions between multiple, coupled small-
scale systems (for example, multiple small commu-
nities and neighborhoods, utilities, transportation,
commercial networks, financial structures, multiple
1 The Economics of Climate Change in Southeast Asia: A Regional Review
(Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Asian Development Bank, 2009), 3–4.
Juzhong Zhuang, the lead report writer, was quoted in TIME, “World
Quotes of the Day,” on April 28, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/
quotes/0,26174,1894320,00.html
.
formal and informal layers of governance, housing,
and nature). This will enable communities to more
effectively respond to different kinds and severities
of risk, shock, stress, or environmental change.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s deepest work in
this area is in an initiative called ACCCRN, or the
Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network,
an initiative investing about $90 million over several
years. The project focuses on 10 second-tier cities
with rapidly growing populations in 4 countries—
Vietnam, India, Indonesia, and Thailand. It includes
not only coastal cities that will experience sea-level
rise, but also cities that are experiencing negative
effects from climate change such as less-predictable
rainfall patterns and increasing temperatures. These
cities are making forward-looking investments in
infrastructure and land development today that
enable innovations in ways of working. In these
mid-sized, growing cities we have much more poten-
tial influence than in megacities, where institutions
are locked into many of the decisions of the past.
The vision of ACCCRN is to catalyze attention,
funding, and action on building the climate-change
resilience of cities as a whole—and within that,
ensuring that the resilience of the most vulnerable
and poor communities is also being developed. This
is being done through capacity building, developing
a network for knowledge and learning, and expansion
and scaling up. We have a range of impressive grant-
ees and partners in this work, including U.S.-based
organizations, multilateral and bilateral funders, local
and regional think tanks and NGOs, and a large
network of government officials, academics, and
private-sector actors from each of these cities.
Publications released on this work, such as
Catalyzing Resilience, and information available on
the Rockefeller Foundation website summarize the
significant lessons on how to build the resilience
of households and institutions in cities—lessons
that are applicable across the world, not just in
116 | USAID FRONTIERS IN DEVELOPMENT
