Urban resilience 2020

Today over 50% of the world population lives in urban areas, and cities account for 60-80% of global energy consumption and the same level of greenhouse gas emissions, producing 50% of global waste, consuming 75% of natural resources, and producing 80% of global GDP. Cities and their populations are vulnerable and increasingly exposed to rapid and slow on-setting climate and environmental disasters, which frequency and intensity are growing exponentially. Cities are also major centers of economic activity, social life, and culture, innovation, and knowledge-creation.

Urban resilience aims at increasing the ability of urban systems, to respond systemically and dynamically to present and future shock and stresses related to major global challenges as unsustainable development patterns, rapid and unplanned urbanization, climate change mitigation, and adaptation.

Urban resilience is instrumental to address both causes and effects of these major global challenges, re-thinking the way in which cities are designed, planned, and managed, at the same time fostering innovation.

The scientific research on urban resilience has been exponentially growing in the last decade, parallelly a growing number of cities worldwide started developing resilience-related plans and actions, following the recommendations and prescriptions national and international policies, as Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Agreement, New Urban Agenda and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The key challenge for urban resilience is to co-develop and harmonize scientific and practice-led knowledge to support informed and science-based decision and policymaking, to enable our cities to evolve and innovate.

The BLOXHUB Summer School on Urban Resilience 2020 will bring together on-line researchers, practitioners, and policymakers during June 2020.

The summer school aims at providing multi-disciplinary knowledge and perspectives on the different global and local challenges for urban resilience in the Global South and North.  The training is organized as a series of lectures and work in small groups to respond to a problem-based challenge.

The participants will gain the necessary competences to develop informed policies, strategies, plans, and solutions for urban resilience, at the time of Covid-19.

The participants will develop their knowledge on:

• The basis of urban resilience science, and the development of resilience research in different disciplinary contexts;

• International policies (Sustainable Development Goals, Paris Agreement, New Urban Agenda and Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction);

• National policies regarding climate adaptation and mitigation, including urban content of Nationally, Determined Contributions and urban aspects of National Adaptations Plan and Policies;

• Urban resilience practices with specific case studies from cities worldwide, including strategic plans, action plans, and technological solutions
  The participants will develop competencies on the use of:

• Process design methodology for urban resilience;

• System thinking for the analysis of urban shock and stresses;

• Different future scenarios methods: forecasting, visioning and backcasting

Scientist and researchers: including Ph.D. candidates, post-docs, research fellows and lecturers from universities and research organizations.

Practitioners: including policymakers, from national and subnational governments and public organizations, officers from international and intergovernmental organizations, staff from private profit, and non-profit organizations.

Participants with different disciplinary backgrounds: are welcome including engineering, architecture, planning, environmental, economic, and social sciences.

English language proficiency is required.

Fees

There is a fee for participants of 300 EUR.

Successful candidates will receive information about the modes of payment once admitted.

A fee reduction is foreseen for applicants from the Global South.

The participants shall request the fee reduction during the application. Each request will be assessed individually.

To verify your initial eligibility for the reduced fee (country classification) please refer to the World Bank Country and Lending Groups.

Application procedure

The Summer School Urban Resilience is targeted at practitioners, scientists, and researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds including engineering, architecture, planning, environmental, economic, and social sciences.

There is a limited number of places available, therefore the participants will be competitively selected according to their curriculum vitae, motivation letter, and the application form.

In order to apply, send the following documents tomanar@iti.sdu.dk–  indicating ‘Application BLOXHUB-SSUR’ in the subject line:

• Your curriculum vitae.

• A motivation letter, explaining in 300 to 500 words why you would like to participate in this summer school, how it can help your academic and professional development, as well as, what are your competencies and expertise you can contribute with to the summer school.

• The application form (download)

Please note that mandatory documents are to be sent as a single PDF file.

Open submission:12 February 2020

Extended deadline for submissions: 30 April 2020

Course date: June 2020 (twice a week)

Course structure

The Summer School will be held over one month in June with daily sessions twice a week.
Each daily session will consist of:
(1) Lecture sessions: 2.5 hours (accessible for general public)
two lectures back to back with Q&A
(2) Working sessions: 3 hours (for selected participants only)
For group discussion and group work on a specific problem-based challenge