Looking ahead to the Global Resilience Summit
I’m thinking about 'How can business help deal with crises in cities?' There is a particular reason, besides crisis and risk being a professional preoccupation for me, and that’s because I am chairing a panel at The Global Resilience Summit in London on the 15th October. This Summit has been arranged by London First and, if it is anything like last year’s ‘World Cities’ event, it is going to be a superb line up of speakers and reviewers.
On my panel will be Simon Gilderson MBE from Alvarez Marshall, Dr Brooke Rogers from Kings College, Richard Look from BuroHappold Engineering and Julia Spain from Aon Risk Solutions. With that broad church of expertise and opinion in play we will be addressing a range of questions. These focus on the current and future role for business, in city-wide crisis response, on the nature and ownership of “resilience resources” and how proactive investment from a number of sources can be directed in the future. Coupled to this, we want to understand if business has a role in, or can influence, innovations to the social infrastructure of a modern city’s resilience and crisis response.
The questions surrounding city resilience are as numerous as they are pressing. The cities themselves, containing for the first time 50% of the world’s population and with some estimates expecting that to rise to 70% in the next thirty years, are definitely under growing pressure. Cities however, are complex animals. That pressure is not solely on the citizens who need to be housed, transported, kept healthy, nourished and allowed to play. Another citizenry co-exists and, at times of crisis, might hold the key to a city’s resilience.
That other citizenry we might call “the corporate presence”, and they are a fascinating group to consider. Although companies are housed in, and benefit from, city infrastructures they can, at times, feel at one remove from it. Historically their resilience is often a function of their own size and scale, independent of that of the city itself. Their usual response to crises, be these meteorological, epidemiological, geo-political or even international cyber-crime, to name a few, are potentially what we might call “isolationist”. Designed to protect the licence to operate and the continuous operation of the company’s strategic mandate.
A key question to ask is whether companies would benefit and better promote their own values, by moving from this slightly isolationist system to a more pro-social system. In effect having a social conscience that looks out not just for their obvious near neighbours, who might need compassion in a time crisis, but for the long term health of the city organism itself.
This ‘meta-resilience’ agenda, were it to marshal significant resources, would seem to be the only one which would guarantee that future cities remain sustainable places, in times of crisis and normality, to support resilient businesses. One could argue that the corporate presence of globally foot-printed companies in the cities, because of their size, diversity and decades of experience of the volatile world, hold key insights into resilience on this sort of scale. Insight which city leaders, planners, thinkers and servants would benefit greatly from sharing.
Should be an interesting conference.
