Strengthening Place Resilience: Integrating Climate Change Mitigation into Placemaking and Place Branding

In the first blog in our series on Place Resilience “The key role of place and destination brand strategists in promoting place resilience as a response to the climate emergency”, Malcolm Allan, Special Observer of TPBO and Co-founder of Place Branding Academy, discussed the role of place brand strategists in contributing to building and promoting the resilience of their place as a response to the climate emergency and as an important part of place branding strategies.

Continuing and expanding on that topic, in this blog Malcolm draws on his work as a town planner, economic developer and latterly as a place brand strategist over the last 50 years, to share his thinking and insights on “Future Risk Assessment” needs to become a key activity of place planning and development and a key element of place brand strategies.

Malcolm has recently written on this topic in a Chapter of the recently published Elgar “Encyclopaedia of Place Branding” and developed a Masterclass on the topic which can be accessed on the website of the Place Brand Academy.

He discusses why incorporating action to increase their resilience needs to be a priority for places, in particular towns, cities and urban conurbations.

They need to strengthen their place planning against current, predicted, probable or potential challenges, in particular to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as well as the actions that cultural and tourist destinations can can take and integrate into their brand-led placemaking strategies and their offers to target audiences in order to build a positive reputation and position themselves as a place that is serious and proactive in responding to climate change to improve their resilience.

Photo by Dakar Roy on Unsplash

Governments play a crucial role in strengthening place resilience and defining their brand

For some considerable time urban planners have known that a core function of government has to be to increase the resilience of places in the face of major, recurring and ongoing challenges, such as economic disruption, migration and climate change.

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) defines resilience as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events”.

This definition was also approved by organisations representing 750,000 industry professionals in land use, planning, and development in the US, including the American Institute of Architects, the American Planning Association, and the U.S. Green Building Council.

It recognised that in building place resilience, local governments around the world have many powers, statutory functions, and responsibilities that can be harnessed to make places more resilient in the face of climate change.

Examples include:

• Using zoning, planning and building regulation powers to influence development proposals for new or adapted buildings.

• Prioritising retrofitting worn-out housing stocks to ensure they are maximally green and carbon neutral.

• Investing in electric powered vehicles for public transportation, upgrading stormwater and flood control systems, and limiting or halting development on flood plains.

All of these measures require substantial resources at a time of constraint, but mitigation is surely preferable to the rising costs of long-term damage and destruction.

Combining emergency response with long-term, sustainable development planning

“Prevention is better than cure” is the guiding principle.

Preventive measures to reduce disaster risks must be implemented before they occur, rather than focusing only on response and recovery after the fact.

According to the UN’s “Trends in Urban Resilience 2017” report, which provides useful insights for place makers on increasing resilience of urban areas, two major conclusions relevant to placemakers confirm the importance of long-term planning for strengthening resilience and supporting climate action:

• As the world becomes increasingly urban, inadequate planning for natural disasters or human induced stress puts cities under severe strain if not anticipated, leading to infrastructure destruction, sudden service disruptions, and intensified socioeconomic vulnerabilities.

• Decades of experience in disaster risk reduction and emergency management show that protecting people and assets must go beyond traditional risk reduction. It requires forward looking development planning, and placemakers must shift in pre and post crisis situations from simply reducing exposure to strengthening resilience capacity, combining emergency interventions such as responses to climate change driven flooding and forest fires with longer term, integrated sustainable urban development.

What specific actions can be taken to strengthen place resilience and the brand of place?

The focus of resilient placemaking lies in combining placemaking and place branding, focusing in part on “antifragile” actions, a term coined by Nassim Taleb. This means that local authorities must learn from events with destructive impact, from errors and volatility, specifically from climate change and its impacts on urban areas, to build stronger and more sustainable places and not repeat the mistakes of the past which increased their fragility.

Some important examples reinforce this view.

The ULI’s 2015 report on “returns from resilience” highlighted how real estate development changed significantly in the first 15 years of the 21st century due to disruptive events in the US like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, which caused devastating human and material losses.

The report also noted the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events, from droughts and wildfires in the U.S. west to hurricanes and floods in the east, which raised awareness of climate risks and inspired new thinking about “building for resilience” as an approach to urban development and placemaking that enables places to survive such volatility.

Place risk assessment process

Another ULI report proposed a six step process for places to adopt to assess the most likely hazards and identifying the assets and communities most at risk, to then build effective resilience action planning:

1.    Identify and define the most relevant types of hazards the place faces.

2.    Define potential event scenarios.

3.    Identify affected assets.

4.    Assess the potential scale and nature of the damage to those assets.

5.    Calculate the annual risk exposure of the place.

6.    Calculate the cumulative risk exposure over time.

The report concluded that the best way to respond to these challenges is for municipal leaders to fully understand the scale, frequency and nature of the risks their place and community face. This enables them to identify the resources required to build resilience and mitigate the harmful impacts of climate change.

Suggested Practical Actions for Strengthening Place Resilience and Place Branding

More recently in the UK, the Royal Institute of British Architects has actively explored the role of architects in making urban settlements more resilient, publishing reports and blog posts to galvanise collective climate action. One in particular examined strategies for encouraging climate action in local authorities, posing the question: how can local governments pivot towards purposeful climate action, and what processes must be put in place to co-create sustainable places with communities?

Key actions from their research and case studies that places can take include:

• Facilitating and making use of people with existing relevant expertise and investing in human resources to build capacity to plan for mitigation of known and potential risks.

• Planning for low carbon development through deployment of relevant expertise to influence, at early stages, development and adaptation proposals.

• Developing and implementing systems for carbon accounting for development and delivery of services.

• Developing proactive adaptation tactics to address known climate risks – e.g. flooding, drought and overheating.

Also in the UK, the Royal Town Planning Institute published a guide for local authorities on planning for climate change. Among its key findings and proposals are:

• Climate mitigation and adaptation need to be central principles of plan-making, and therefore of placemaking.

• Addressing climate change is a core land use planning principle to underpin plan-making and decision-taking; in other words it is not optional.

• Local plan policies need to secure important outcomes including robust assessment of the potential for local policies to achieve local emissions reduction.

• The planning system should help to shape places that contribute to radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

• Local plans should take a proactive approach to mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Examples of Cities Practicing Resilient Placemaking for Climate Impact Mitigation

Examples of places, cities and towns, that are undertaking sustainable placemaking in a way that increases their resilience to and mitigates the impacts of climate change include Bristol (UK), Copenhagen (Denmark), Exeter (UK), Lodz (Poland), Medellin (Colombia) and New York City (USA).

Copenhagen, in particular, is a prime example of simultaneously reducing carbon emissions, increasing sustainability, and building climate resilience. Under its CPH 2025 Climate Plan, the city aims to become the world’s first carbon neutral capital by 2025 while also developing an entirely climate resilient neighbourhood, Osterbro.

In conclusion:

Many cities and localities have now recognised the importance of strengthening resilience to mitigate climate impacts on urban areas.

Given its importance, this activity needs to be incorporated into the development, marketing and implementation of place brand strategies.

It can become a defining differentiator for a place.

It can also be one that distinguishes places from each other.

And it can be a decisive factor in helping places to maintain public confidence and retain and attract talent, businesses and investment.