Participatory urban resilience planning: the CityRAP methodology.

The training aims at shedding light on the key role of participatory approaches for urban resilience planning providing insights and ideas on how to effectively implement them. In a global scenario where cities are at the forefront of increasingly complex challenges due to the compounding effect of rapid urbanisation and the escalating impact of climate change, making urban settlements more resilient is of the utmost importance to face current and future threats while aiming at a sustainable development. When planning toward the achievement of such a goal, participatory approaches are crucial. Building urban resilience in a participatory manner will ensure representation of the more vulnerable groups, will allow to achieve a transversal buy-in and ownership, will leverage local knowledge for a context-specific planning. With this purpose, the Technical Centre for Disaster Risk Management, Sustainability and Urban Resilience for Southern Africa (DiMSUR) in partnership with UN-Habitat, developed the City Resilience Action Planning (CityRAP) Tool as a methodology to enable governments and communities of small to intermediate sized cities to understand risks and work together to plan practical actions to progressively build urban resilience. This training will provide participants with a general overview the CityRAP presenting its main outcomes and its potential for unlocking possibilities, as well as with specific knowledge on activities specifically designed for urban data collection and stakeholder consultations for urban resilience planning. Although the main target audience are local governments, other stakeholders such as academia, UN agencies, donors, and other organisations that might be interested in the methodology and willing to implement participatory planning activities as part of their programmes and ongoing/ future initiatives, are also well positioned to attend the training because ultimately, end beneficiaries will be cities and inhabitants