The new organisation has the ambition to “co-create urban solutions to address complex and interrelated urban challenges, so that cities and communities thrive”.Įxecutive director Lauren Sorkin will lead the organisation, and its Global Steering Committee will be led by co-chairs from Belfast, Northern Ireland and Christchurch, New Zealand. The Resilient Cities Network has been launched following the Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to sunset the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative.

In a statement released by GRCN, Toby Kent, chief resilience officer of Melbourne, Australia, said cities involved in this work are used to turning 'challenges and crises into opportunities,' and the post-coronavirus recovery is no different.The Resilient Cities Network has been launched following the Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to sunset the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative.

There is also hope that the existing network of cities, which have worked together in the past under the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) umbrella to produce resiliency plans and share viewpoints on all kinds of extreme events, can be effective. With 95% of infected people living in cities, the response to COVID-19 has been a challenging experience for city leaders, GRCN said. Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said during an April webinar that various levels of government were 'out of sync' on coronavirus response, meaning cities and states were sometimes unintentionally working against each other.īut GRCN is looking to share recovery lessons in a bid to 'mobilize collective action.' And with issues around the effects of climate change, congestion, equity and public health sure to linger past the coronavirus, Sorkin said this coalition represents a chance to 'fix the broken systems that exacerbated the impacts of the virus on our vulnerable communities.'

Cities are slowly planning how they can recover from the coronavirus, drawing on lessons from the experience and aiming to rebuild with more resiliency to future extreme events.

Global resilient cities network (grcn)