Building Back Better through Urban Recovery Approaches

Disasters concentrated in urban areas have the potential to cause magnified large scale social, economic, political and built destruction and disruption. This can be particularly devastating to productive sectors, public services provision, infrastructure, social constructs and institutional management systems, which often has ramifications on essential systems at national scales.

For instance, the severe damages caused by the protracted crisis in Syria’s largest city and vital economic centre, Aleppo, and the pre-existing impasse to manage the Lebanese energy sector and recent collapse in energy provision brought to the forefront of the multiple crises in Lebanon, following the destruction of the national energy company, Electricité du Liban, in the 4 August 2020 blast in Beirut, shows impact beyond physically affected areas.

Crises unfolding in cities therefore have to be understood and responded to both by addressing the suspension in access to livelihoods, protection mechanisms, services, housing and more, for large populations at the local level, and by the critical impact such events have on interconnected systems and economic activities at regional and national levels, and on countries overall abilities to respond and bounce back from crises.

The emergence of a growing number of complex, multi-faceted and protracted man-made and natural crises affecting cities, has prompted international, national and local partners to elaborate and pilot new tools and ways of working that are more attuned to the specificities of urban crises impacts. Several urban profiling and analysis tools have emerged to guide needs overview and response planning in cities, and urban response methodologies have been formulated, in particular “area-based approaches” (ABAs). This becomes increasingly important as solutions to protracted crises are sought.  Few examples have emerged that are robust enough to persuade stakeholders to adopt ABAs as a tool for spatial coordination, prioritisation and sequencing of activities, whilst also ensuring a shift towards the triple (humanitarian-development-peace) nexus.  

In response to different types of urban crises, UN-Habitat, together with partners, has been promoting the application of the Urban Recovery Framework (URF), which aims to identify and address immediate and medium-term urban recovery interventions while laying the foundations for longer-term resilience strategies in cities affected by natural or man-made crises, including conflict.

The event aims at facilitating the dialogue between varieties of stakeholders in countries which have suffered from manmade and natural disasters and led to recovery and resilience building processes in cities. In the event, the experiences from different countries will be presented and discussed, with a focus on lessons learning for urban recovery and resilience in other crisis contexts. Challenges to promoting, adopting and implementing an urban recovery framework will also be discussed – including the presence of multiple, often uncoordinated, stakeholders and actors on the ground.