Real estate industry key to resilient cities

A new report is calling on real estate professionals and city officials to adopt new guidelines to bolster the resilience of cities to climate change and extreme weather incidents.

The Urban Land Institute’s Center for Sustainability and Economic Performance outlines ten fundamental principles for building resilient cities and regions.

By adopting 10 principles, cities will be able to prepare, respond to and recover from, hurricanes and other extreme weather events; and the long-term effects of climate change.

The Ten Principles for Building Resilience are:

  • Understand vulnerabilities
  • Strengthen job and housing opportunities
  • Promote equity
  • Leverage community assets
  • Redefine how and where to build
  • Build the business case
  • Accurately price the cost of inaction
  • Design with natural systems
  • Maximize co-benefits; and
  • Harness innovation and technology.

The private real estate sector’s investment in more resilient buildings and infrastructure is a key theme discussed in the report.

"The concept of the business case —the proof of return on the individual and collective investment—is a powerful tool to guide decision-making and assemble the resources to rebuild homes, businesses, and infrastructures of water, transport, and communications upon which the well-being of communities relies," said former ULI Global Chairman Marilyn Jordan Taylor, a ULI governing trustee and professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania.

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