Mainstreaming resilience into urban practices

Disaster resilience aims to reduce losses by equipping cities to withstand, absorb, adapt to or recover from external shocks. Planning for disaster resilient cities is a long-term process, however South African spatial planning practices are consumed with immediate development priorities and challenges. Issues of development planning thus take precedence over issues of sustainability and resilience. Only if urban planners understand disaster resilience as a means to secure a city’s development path while simultaneously addressing sustainability, will disaster resilience more likely be translated into spatial planning practices. This policy note considers the challenges of and rationale for mainstreaming disaster resilience into spatial planning practices and is written with policy makers and practitioners in spatial planning, regional planning and disaster management in mind.

Abstract based directly on the original source.