Resilient City Hub - who are we?

‘The resilient city’ hub is a CfS Knowledge & Innovation Lab, in which professional interests meet these of researchers and university students.

It is often heard that cities of the future should become resilient, circular and sustainable. Resources will be used more efficiently, and for greater benefit. They will be more organized and coordinated to implement actions, and better prepared to deal with future challenges, both foreseen and unexpected.

It is considered a grand societal challenge that needs collaborative effort and knowledge development to enable a transition to such a future city.  New technologies and innovative initiatives needs institutionalisation and mainstreaming of resilience into plans, decision making and practice in several ways.

Resilient city hub

The ‘Resilient city hub’ wants to support the Metropole Region Rotterdam-The Hague on its way to create a resilient, future proof, circular and sustainable regional economy. Both cities and the Province of South Holland have asked the LDE Centre for Sustainability to play a significant role in this ongoing transition.

Professors, MSc and PhD students from Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam in (among others) industrial design, public administration, architecture, urbanism, sociology and economy form the hub. Students from all disciplinary background and MSc programs are welcome to join us, and thus contribute to the resilient cities.

Research questions

Through our connection to a wide variety of stakeholders (ranging from political parties to industry) we collected a number of research questions that would be of great interest to students looking for an interesting, real-world, and timely research topic for e.g. a master thesis. Through their work with the CfS students learn to understand, evaluate and design for the complexities of sustainability in an urban context. Students are also encouraged to approach us with their own research ideas.

Broadly speaking we see two partially overlapping areas of interest: Resilience and Circular Economy

Resilience

Both the City of The Hague and Rotterdam were selected to participate in the 100 Resilient Cities program, joining a network of cities around the world that are supported by the Rockefeller Foundation in making significant resilience related investments.

Building urban resilience includes accounting for not just the shocks—earthquakes, fires, floods, etc.—but also the stresses that weaken the fabric of a city on a day to day or cyclical basis. In a December 2016 workshop, a diverse group of stakeholders identified aging infrastructure, climate change, inequality and social instability as the main stresses for The Hague. Potential shocks included pandemic diseases, riots, cyber-attacks, terrorist attacks and infrastructural failures.

Research topics include:
- Modelling, monitoring and measuring resilience
- Road maps to resilience
- Participatory and inclusive resilience
- Lessons learnt from other cities
- Cities' dialogs

Circular economy

In 2015 the EU launched the Circular Economy package. This signalled an EU-wide drive to transition from a linear once-through economy (make, use, dispose) to a renewable circular economy, where resources are kept in use and products are recovered at the end of their service life. The Rotterdam-The Hague metropolitan region is poised to take the lead in this transition, but it needs your help to identify and investigate opportunities.

Research topics include:
- Mapping and understanding city metabolism
- Mining the built environment
- Energy & Raw Materials Factory: from waste water to energy and raw materials
- Energie akkoord: barrier to implementation and opportunities

More information
Soft Launch Resilient City Hub: open for participants!