We saw all this and chose resilience 🌱
At the heart of resilience are people — building places that are green, open, shared and alive.
These are the cities we are building and want to keep shaping, together. 🌿
🌹 As institutions, we often only see the thorns and not the rose.
When we only look at neighborhoods through data, policy challenges and risk indicators, it is easy to focus on what is missing.
In Bospolder–Tussendijken, Rotterdam, the story begins with what is already there: social networks, shared spaces and informal connection. Everyday acts of care that quietly hold communities together.
City of Rotterdam, @veldacademie_rotterdam , BoTu’s residents and partners including the Resilient Cities Network worked together to recognize and strengthen these existing foundations, supported by the UP2030 programme.
The result is two new resources that make up a Toolkit for Resilient Neighborhoods:
📖 Stories of Neighborhood Resilience from BoTu
Real examples showing how resilience emerges through people, relationships and local action.
🧰 Building Blocks for Resilient Neighbourhoods
A practical guide that translates these experiences into principles other communities can adapt to their own context.
🔗Link in bio!
January tends to come with big statements.
For us, it started with listening more closely to what cities are already telling us.
More than 100 contributions from practitioners helped us build a shared map of solutions that are helping cities build resilience. The Solutions Map, developed at the Resilient Cities Forum, brings together what cities are already delivering and highlights the enablers that make this possible.
One thing was clear. Cities are not starting from zero. What’s missing is an ecosystem that helps them move faster together.
That’s why we launched the Practitioners’ Call to Scale during the Forum, inviting governments, funders, partners and networks to help cities bring proven solutions to more people.
Join us. /resilience-practitioners/
@theconduitlondon
A solution to urban heat, flooding and the loneliness epidemic, all in a low-cost and scalable format? 👀
SIGN US UP!
More and more cities are turning to 🌱 pocket parks 🌱 as a practical way to bring cooling, nature and social connection closer to where people live. These small spaces are helping transform vacant lots, leftover corners and underused land into places that support everyday life.
That’s why we collaborated with experts from @arupgroup , @deltares and representatives from 16+ cities and communities to explore what makes these spaces successful in different local contexts.
Want to join the movement? Dive into our new 5-step practical implementation guide: One Pocket at a Time. 🔗 Link in bio!
The next big thing is a lot of small things.🐜
Cities need to address heat, flooding and access to green space, but land and resources are scarce. Many spaces are too small for large-scale projects, and funding is not always available to deliver them.
🌱Pocket Parks are emerging as practical solutions that work within these constraints, making use of overlooked spaces. They capture runoff during heavy rain, cool streets through shade, and create places where people can connect close to home.
What may seem like a small intervention creates a big impact when multiplied across cities.
Our new Practical Guide to plan, design and deliver Pocket Parks, developed in collaboration with @arupgroup and @deltares , focuses on 5️⃣ stages to transform cities one pocket at a time:
1. Choosing a site: Communities, cities and developers can identify sites that are vacant, underused or have the potential to respond to local needs.
2. Designing your Pocket Park: Every Pocket Park is inherently unique and should be shaped by its community, context and the space it claims.
3. Building your Pocket Park: Governance and delivery models are a critical component to building pocket parks, whether public, private or mixed.
4. Measuring your impact: Pocket parks deliver a wide range of benefits, and monitoring their impact must be built into project design.
5. Growing your impact: Pocket parks can unlock their greatest impact as part of a broader, interconnected network of greening efforts.
Together, we are embracing the power of small-scale change. Will you join in?
Download the guide to get started.
🔗Link in bio!
👩🏽🔬🧪 From scientist to Chief Resilience Officer, Dr. Jennifer Jurado has come to understand policy, ecology and infrastructure as interconnected systems.
"It became very clear early in my career that when we thought about climate change, the implications were really about water in our community", Dr. Jurado recalled.
In the years since, she has led multibillion-dollar water infrastructure projects to prepare Broward County and South Florida for the future. @browardresilience
With multiple major infrastructure projects under her belt, Dr. Jurado speaks with authority on what it takes to bring partners together for sustained action over decades.
Read her Resilience Journal: /dr-jennifer-jurado-is-mobilising-south-florida-to-meet-the-future-on-its-own-terms/
These women believed they could make a difference.
Today, they’re doing it.🔥
Across the R-Cities network, many more women are driving change in cities around the world. We share a mission: to help build a world where every girl and woman has the chance to dream, grow, be safe, be healthy and seize opportunity.
Because when women lead, cities become stronger, safer and more resilient.
✊ Empower women and girls to be the changemakers of tomorrow.
#ForAllWomenAndGirls #IWD2026
🌊 Floods are a traumatic experience for affected families, and their impacts linger well after the water rises.
Beyond the costs covered by insurance and government relief, new research uncovers the hidden costs of flooding. From taking unpaid time of work to scrambling for childcare, disruptions such as these can cost thousands. The costs and lost wages can add up to over a month's wages for families in social rented housing.
This new data from Zurich Municipal and the Centre for Economics and Business Research underlines the point that flood resilience policy and investments are not optional - they are essential lifelines for a safer, more affordable future.
Through #Resilience4Communities, we're working with communities impacted by floods to co-create solutions and scale our impact so that no family has to bear the hidden cost of floods alone.
🌻 Greener, cooler and safer schoolyards full of play!
What was once space for parking and closed to students in Quezon City is now the very first schoolyard transformed through the OASIS program.
At Diosdado P. Macapagal Public Elementary School, students, teachers and families now have a place to learn, gather and play together.
The new schoolyard uses natural materials like sand, soil, grass and wood to welcome biodiversity. A bird house, an insect hotel and native plants turn the space into a living classroom. Shaded areas, seating and open play spaces make room for everything from badminton to patintero, encouraging social ties over screen time.
This project came to life thanks to our partnership with @temasekfoundation . A huge thanks to everyone involved in creating a space shaped by nature and the community.
Most resilience strategies look 5 to 10 years ahead. Political terms span even less time. Yet risks cities face are already reshaping the next decades. 🌍⏳
🔍 So what does resilience planning need to look like when cities must act in the medium term while building long-term capacity? Whose voices shape those decisions and what data helps guide them?
📍Lagos and📍Salvador explored these questions through foresight workshops held as part of our work with Lloyd’s Register Foundation and @arupgroup . By bringing together risk, data, lived experience and cross-sector perspectives, the cities stress-tested today’s choices against possible futures.
Cities cannot predict what will happen. What they can do is make better decisions now, grounded in people’s realities and strong enough to hold under uncertainty. In Lagos and Salvador, that work begins by treating the future as a shared responsibility.
@lagosresilience_
⛈️ When flash floods struck Quezon City last year, the city had 15 minutes to prepare for five days’ worth of rain in just one hour.
The flooding revealed a dangerous misalignment between national and local flood control policies — a challenge that can arise in any city anywhere in the world.
In our latest episode of the #UrbanExchange podcast, Bianca Perez, Head of Quezon City’s Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office, joins hosts Paul Wilson and Katrin Bruebach for a conversation on strengthening flood and energy resilience in the face of increasingly powerful storms.
🎧 Download and listen at the link in our bio and on your favorite podcasting apps.
