For Release Sunday, May 26, 2013
(c) 2013 Washington Post Writers Group
It's as bold a move as one could imagine. The Rockefeller Foundation, celebrating its 100th anniversary, is launching a "100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge." It will invest $100 million in 100 cities across the world that come up with the best and broadest plans to cope with massive natural and man-made shocks of the time.
In accepting the award, each winning city will be required to appoint a "chief resilience officer" who will work across departments to make sure strong city resilience plans are developed, refreshed and strengthened over time.
As Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin puts it, we're in a time when a "once-every-hundred-year storm becomes a once-a-week storm somewhere." Climate change is leading to massive disruptions – all in addition to potentially dire earthquake, tsunami and infectious health challenges.
And with humankind crowding into cities by the billions – numbers unprecedented in human history – metropolises become the dominant stage for humanity.
The Rockefeller Foundation is especially concerned that the shocks of the times, while a peril to all, may most seriously affect poor and vulnerable people who have fewer means to recover.
Yet some may ask: Isn't it too intrusive for a single foundation to suggest recipient cities must appoint an official with a previously unknown title and duties – "chief resilience officer"?
One reply: The idea comes from a proven friend of humanity. The Rockefeller Foundation has already invested deeply across the world, including in the Green Revolution of the mid-20th century, which introduced crops and production methods credited with saving more than a billion people from starvation.
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For Release Thursday, May 9, 2013
Citiwire.net
(Editor's note: This column was originally published May 9).Plenty of people who knew of Medellín only through its reputation for drug wars were likely surprised when the Colombian city won City of the Year earlier this year, from the Wall Street Journal and Citi, besting New York and Tel Aviv in online voting run by the Urban Land Institute. In this piece, Citistates Associate Nicholas You recounts the decade-long work by a series of innovative mayors to improve not only the physical environment but to inspire social inclusion among the city’s poorest neighborhoods. – Mary Newsom
My first visit to Medellín, Colombia, was in 1995, just a little more than a year after the demise of Pablo Escobar, the renowned drug lord who ran the Medellín Cartel. The internecine warfare sparked by his death brought the city to its knees through relentless violence and crime. By 1999, my second visit, no one ventured out after dark.
Yet it was during this time that the first phase of the Medellín Metro rail system was launched – Colombia's first mass transit system. Its two lines connected downtown with middle class suburbs and a few lower-income neighborhoods. Today it provides efficient and reliable service for more than half a million commuters daily. The metro also inspired a series of urban rehabilitation projects that began to transform the city center into a more urbane space. Rundown warehouse areas were converted into attractive pedestrian malls for stores, restaurants and cafes.
Even so, the city – second largest in Colombia – continued to suffer the ravages of its narco-trafficking past. Violent crime and social exclusion characterized the city, and to this day its income inequity remains among the most extreme of any city in the Western hemisphere.
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