Prioritize resilient city construction, industry experts say

The construction of resilient cities should be the priority of the next stage of China's urbanization, industry experts said.

Resilient cities are cities that have the ability to absorb, recover and prepare for future shocks (economic, environmental, social and institutional). Resilient cities promote sustainable development, well-being and inclusive growth, according to the definition of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

According to Zhang Qi, director of Arup and general manager of the Urban Innovation Center, building resilient cities should be the focus for the country's urbanization in the next stage. The statistics of Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development show that China's urbanization rate has exceeded 60 percent in 2021.

Arup, one of the world's leading engineering consulting companies, just released a white paper on resilient cities. The white paper combines Arup's forward-looking insights, professional knowledge, digital advantages and sustainable development concepts in the urban field with localization practices to provide suggestions for the development of resilient cities.

"For the future, in the new buildings and urban renewal, we must focus on implementing various energy-saving and carbon-reducing measures on the one hand, and on the other hand, we must improve the resilience of buildings to face the uncertainty of external environmental conditions caused by climate change," said Liu Peng, director of Arup and head of the Beijing office.

Arup first promoted aseismic and resilient building evaluation standards in the industry, and developed the smart management platform Neuron from the aspects of improving the flexibility of building functions and adaptive capabilities. At present, the platform has been applied in many high-quality projects.

Wang Min contributed to this story.