January 2021 Update
We hope this finds you in good health and the new year is off to a good start for you. It is a pleasure to share with you the first of our Resilience Brokers newsletters reflecting on some of our accomplishments and happenings we think will be of interest to you.
The RB team looks forward to the coming months guided by renewed inspiration, commitment, collaborative action and togetherness. We are looking to expand our collaboration, working with our partners and friends as we navigate these challenging times towards fairer, healthier, more climate-resilient places and livelihoods.
If you have comments, questions, suggestions or would like to collaborate with Resilience Brokers, do get in touch with us
New member to the team
We are delighted to welcome James Green as a new member to the Resilience Brokers team. As our new community manager, James will be an enthusiastic coordinator for the regional and international communities we work with.
“It is a pleasure to join a thriving and enthusiastic team! I look forward to supporting Resilience Brokers projects and help realise their mission” James Green
Exeter Living Lab
Last March, Resilience Brokers helped establish Pivot Projects to connect researchers, professionals and interested parties into a cross-sector collaborative to model and investigate the opportunities of creating a green, healthy and just recovery. This grew into a global network of over 400 members without any physical meetings.
We started the year launching a partnership with Exeter University to create a Living Lab for the city and region of Exeter, UK. The Living Lab will link the global network to regional expertise, and support students with their studies by focussing on āliveā sustainability and resilience challenges, and facilitate the development of cross-sectoral collaboration in the region to help implement ambitious Net Zero plans.
The first phase of the partnership will establish an online collaboration system and build systems tools, including with artificial intelligence, to support systems decision making for the participants. This will allow Living Lab participants to define the objectives and challenges that are unique to the region, and expressed interests of the participants.
Partnership with Centric Lab
We are excited to now be members of Centric Labās Urban Health Council, working to understand the impacts of urbanisation on public health. Centric Lab works as a research and data driven neuroscience lab to help organisations make effective decisions for supporting mental and physical health, specifically for communities that are the most susceptible to poor health outcomes.
As members of the council, Resilience Brokers will engage with new frameworks, tools, and lexicon based on neuroscience insights and anti-racism principles. This includes workshops, digital tools, reports and roundtable discussions
Relatedly, Resilience Brokers were very grateful to join an illuminating workshop on 2nd Feb., led by Centric Labās Araceli Camargo, on understanding and tackling structural racism in the built environment and placemaking. We recommend checking out her discussion on this topic as part of RTPIās Planners Live Online series.
Find out more about Centric Lab
āData for resilient citiesā podcast
Resilience Brokers CEO Stephen Passmore recently spoke to Loveleen Garg, head of planning at Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (Ahmedabad, India), as part of the āData for Resilient Citiesā podcast series of CEPT Univ. Research & Development FoundationĀ (CRDF). The podcast discussed how professionals and experts must communicate and collectively work to make cities more resilient and robust against potential climate shocks. They also talked about the need for cross-domain data integration to make cities more resilient. Enhanced data use and analytics and common pathways of data science are some of the other key elements of this episode.
Open Data Infrastructure Roadmap (ODIR) document navigator
The Open Data Infrastructure Roadmap (ODIR) for Cities document is a strategic tool for the development of city-level open data infrastructure aligned with the Disaster Resilience Scorecard and the 10 Essentials and featuring a showcase of good practices in a range of contexts. We have been working with Resurgence, UNDRRās Making Cities Resilient Campaign, ESRI, Open North and Geosumr, as well as representatives of city regions to make the resource more accessible, user-friendly and practical to cities. We redesigned and digitised the document as a dynamic, nonlinear web-tool linked to the case studies, which were updated.
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February Community Events
- 10 Feb: Green City Action Plans as strategies for urban resilience (UKCRIC seminar);
- 11 Feb: Sacred Civics: What would it mean to build seven generation cities? with Jayne Engle (Tufts and Kresge Foundation);
- 18 Feb: City Finance Lab (CFL) workshop with Manchester;
- 19 Feb: Climate Action Plans in London Councils (RTPI);
- 22-26 Feb: TNOC Festival (The Nature of Cities).
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For all enquiries get in touch with usĀ