Source: 100 Resilient Cities

By: LAUREN SORKIN & SCOTT ROSENSTEIN

Ahead of the 2015 Skoll World Forum, SkollWorldForum.org and Johnson & Johnson teamed up to pull together information about the innovative solutions, treatments and technologies that are being developed or deployed to address health challenges in urban settings for a special series on cities and health. This is an exerpt from the piece contibuted by 100 Resilient Cities' Lauren Sorkin & Scott Rosenstein.

Cities are complex, adaptive systems that must grapple with an evolving array of threats, both acute shocks like hurricanes and chronic stresses like frequent power outages. The mission of 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation, is to partner with cities around the world to help them build resilience to the physical, social, and economic challenges they are facing in the twenty-first century.

Public health plays a significant role in this conversation for many of our cities. In fact, much of 100RC’s work with cities resembles and builds off of the public health community’s growing focus on health system strengthening interventions that bolster the inter-connected determinants of health (e.g., communications, governance, transportation, data, outreach, human resources). Applying this holistic approach to urban resilience issues leads cities to problem-solve in a way that maximizes the value of available resources and provides second- and third-order benefits — a resilience dividend — to a variety of stakeholders.

Read the full post on the Skoll World Forum blog.