Source: 100 Resilient Cities

By: DUSTIN FIRE

The Resilience Roundup helps you catch up on all the most interesting resilience stories you may have missed. Think we left something out? Leave us a comment!

The New Leadership Business Needs

Three mega-trends impacting the shape of contemporary business according to the Harvard Business Review: resource constraints and rising commodity prices; climate change and extreme weather; and radical, technology-driven transparency.

Who will protect businesses from the increasing threat of climate change? As HBR’s Andrew Winston puts it: “everyone will need a Chief Resilience Officer, although that should really be the CEO.” 

Four Ways Street Design Can Increase Public Safety

Based on their unique perspective on urbanism that derives from work on Brazilian cities, the team at Nossa Cidade (“Our City”), from TheCityFix Brasil, offers this take on the classic work of Jane Jacobs about the role of streets in the city. They outline four street design elements that play a significant role in increasing public safety (in Brazil and elsewhere):

• Ample room for walking: increased opportunities for pedestrians increase safety.

• Visibility of streets from buildings: when people inside buildings and on the street can see eachother, the connection increases safety.

• Attractive public spaces: nicer public spaces attract more people, contributing to a sense of safety.

• Lots of light: darkness, especially at night, often leads to insecurity. 

Keeping cities safe requires thoughtful design and policy, starting at the street level. 

How Brown Bags Can Make Cities Cleaner

At a cost of less than four cents per use, Peepoople acts as an emergency toilet that turns dangerous waste into useful fertilizer and keeps that waste off the street. While this new innovation in personal hygiene may make some people a little uncomfortable, it could also play a huge role in addressing the challenge of open defecation communities that lack sanitation.

(Green) City Design Makes Kids Smarter

Mental performance tests conducted in Barcelona indicate that green spaces within and around city schools improve the mental development of young children—short-term development improved by 5%, memory increased by 6%, and inattentiveness was reduced.

Making Hurricane Risk Personal In Florida

“People can’t visualize it. They have never experienced it,” says Pinellas Country Emergency Director Sally Bishop about the ever-present risks of hurricane exposure. Her new storm preparedness tool, called Storm Surge Protector, aims to overcome that gap by allowing users to enter a Pinellas County, Florida address to see the property’s evacuation zone and get an animated view of the building and water levels that can be expected in different hurricane categories.

h/t Emergency Management 

Showing the impacts of a storm surge during a storm to a specific neighborhood. Captured from the Pinellas County Storm Surge Protector Web App.

Bringing Healthy Options To Corner Stores

Many lower-income neighborhoods face the same problem: an abundance of food, but very few healthy options. Health Retail SF, modeled on Philadelphia’s Food Trust, is designed to make healthy, affordable options available at neighborhood markets in low-income neighborhoods in San Francisco.

Since the start of the program in 2011, nine stores have been reset in neighborhoods throughout San Francisco, and three to five more are planned for coming months. 

Do you have a resilience story from the past few weeks that we missed? Share it in the comments or on Twitter with #ResilientCities and it might make it into the next roundup.