For this year’s World Town Planning Day, the RTPI is focusing on resilience and how planning is key to enabling cities and communities to respond to the shocks and stresses of our time, creating place-based, integrated and inclusive solutions.
Resilience can be defined as the capacity of a system to undergo disturbance and maintain its functions and controls. With the ever-growing list of risks facing the modern world, cities are being tasked with building resilience to the physical, social, and economic challenges that they are being faced with. A resilient city is one with less social inequalities and a fairer distribution of resilience resources, and an important part of how cities can achieve these revolves around their planned development.
An initiative called ‘100 Resilient Cities’ was established to support cities around the world who have demonstrated a dedicated commitment to building their own capacities to prepare for, withstand, and bounce back rapidly from those shocks and stresses. One such city selected to join this exclusive network is Origin3’s home city of Bristol.
As Britain’s fastest growing city, Bristol has, and continues to, invest billions in new and renewed infrastructure, particularly in transportation, energy, housing, and business. This has contributed to it becoming the UK’s most energy- and waste-efficient of the UK’s major cities.
However, the city, like so many others, is currently facing a climate emergency and a housing crisis. Decent affordable homes are the foundation to a successful city and, whilst the aim is to develop 24,000 new affordable homes by 2050, with much of Bristol’s building stock being old, this represents a variety of challenges to overcome.
An ongoing resolution sees the city working to enable owners to future-proof these buildings, which will support and protect human life and enable commerce, the results of which should positively impact housing affordability through reduced running costs of sustainable homes. This will help to achieve the aims of reducing inequality in the city, ensure housing provision for a growing population, future-proofing infrastructure and building social cohesion.
The Bristol Resilience Strategy has also been established, providing a framework for action to protect the city against potential future shocks and stresses. One major issue the framework seeks to resolve is the city’s traffic congestion. Overcoming such an ingrained problem will require new policy focus to promote a reorganisation of existing urban areas, including the creation of opportunities to work and access services closer to home, within convenient walking and cycling reach. Such a future is hoped to be achieved with the action of The Joint Local Transport Plan 4 led by the West of England Combined Authority.
Another initiative seeking positive change, set up by the City Council, is the Bristol Green Capital Partnership; consisting of over 1,000 member organisations who have committed to working towards a zero carbon and socially just city. The Partnership’s ambition is to gather local stakeholders eager to collaborate to transform Bristol and develop it into a green city.
Aside from setting up this partnership, the Council has already implemented positive environmental policies since the climate emergency was first announced in 2018, including introducing the Clean Air Zone, in addition to making positive steps toward its tree-planting targets. The latter is of particular importance with a New Scientist article publish in November 2021 indicating that trees cool the land surface temperature of cities by up to 12°C; a welcome potential respite as cities get hotter.
Although there’s an arduous journey ahead in achieving these targets, it’s good to see an attempt is being made in making positive change.
Ed Leeson, Origin3
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