The shocks communities face are, for the most part, shared with their neighbors. Yet, most efforts to mitigate or prepare for shocks are addressed community by community, or city by city. Regional interventions that account for both urban and rural areas, and the wealthier and poorer jurisdictions within, are few and far between. This panel applies the conference theme onto the fields of disaster management and resilience planning to: 1) identify contemporary municipal vs. regional strategies; 2) describe the political, financial, social, and geographic reasons for collaboration or autonomy through those strategies; and 3) assess the strategies’ implementation and outcomes to date.
The four papers in this panel will use U.S. and Canadian examples of disaster investments and resilience interventions within different governance contexts: core metropolises; multi-nodal regions; predominately rural regions; and regions with and without coordinating regional entities. Panelists also come from a variety of professional perspectives: Toronto’s Chief Resilience Officer; a scholar focused on a single city’s resilience planning (Norfolk, Virginia) under the 100 Resilient Cities program; a foundation officer focused on disaster response in the rural US Midwest; and a scholar of comparative governance and capacity-building for disaster and resilience interventions sponsored by the U.S. federal government and international philanthropy. Jointly, the papers provide nuanced insight into whether and how regions have approached their shared challenges through—and, alternately, despite or because of—their respective cities.
Moderator: Carlos Martin, Urban Institute
Leading by Example: The Case of Norfolk’s Resilience Strategy and Implementation Diane Levy, Urban Institute
When Your Neighbors are Just Like You: Rethinking Resilience Capacity in Rural Regions Erin Coryell, Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies
Sharing the Wealth: Assessing Regional Spillovers in Urban Resilience Programs CarlosMartin, Urban Institute