In October 2020, the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) commissioned Maynooth University, in partnership with the International Centre for Local and Regional Development (ICLRD), the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) and LERO to develop a scoping paper on building resilient and sustainable cities on the island of Ireland.
The resulting report, Building Long Term Resilient and Sustainable Cities, by Caroline Creamer, Niall Connolly and Zaira Rivera Fernandez explores the conditions required to enable cities to build resilience. The research paper looks at actions needed to make cities resilient and liveable places, by prioritising the inter-relationship between people and place, especially the natural environment. The paper highlight approaches to resilience being adopted by a number of cities across Europe. Planning local responses, for example, by carrying out detailed urban risk assessments, is helping to address global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, economic pressures due to COVID-19 and the drive to become more sustainable.
In welcoming the paper, the Director of NESC Dr Larry O’Connell said that ‘this fascinating paper highlights what some cities are doing to build resilience. This includes investing in place-based leadership, such as dedicated Resilience leaders. These cities are also investing in ways to generate a collective response, such as Innovation Zones, Sounding Boards and deep and meaningful processes to support engagement between the public sector, businesses, academics and communities’
A copy of the report can be downloaded here.
