Geo-powering Cities for Resilience
Organizer: World Bank’s City Planning Labs
| This session is part of the Development & Climate Days. The urban data revolution has already started. Over the last decade, cities have been offered unprecedented opportunities to mobilize geospatial data to enhance livability and reduce vulnerability through risk-informed decision making. Data is helping cities prioritize investments to build resilient cities and to boost sustainable development. But truly geo-powering cities involves not only the use of geospatial data, but ensuring that data turns into information and decision makers have the capacity and tools to make evidence-based decisions. This requires moving away from sectoral egos and towards an ecosystem approach where the identification of risks and solutions is done in a collaborative manner; and innovation, technology, capacity, and regulation work together to strengthen evidence-based spatial planning, increasing resilience in the system. This approach is being promoted by the World Bank’s City Planning Labs (CPL) technical assistance initiative to geo-power client governments through Municipal Spatial Data Infrastructure (MSDI). MSDI is operationalized under four interconnected pillars: Institutional Arrangements, People, Data and Systems, or IPDS in short. Participants will learn how MSDI’s four pillar framework and its associated tools offer a unique solution for institutionalizing resilient urban planning and management through enhanced inter-agency collaboration, robust data foundations, cutting edge risks analytical tools and digital platforms developed under CPL. The session includes a global panel of experts to discuss how they’ve successfully operationalized SDI. Participants will learn about three agile urban planning tools to advance, sustainable, and resilient urban development. Suitability uses multicriteria analysis to create heat maps of access to urban services within minutes or find optimal locations for a specific activity within a city. Urban Performance assesses the city’s present and future performance by creating multiple growth scenarios that include investment projects, public policies and land regulations. The results are evaluated in a set of indicators related to the Sustainable Development Goals. CollabData is a robust digital platform that captures needs, challenges and ground realities of the communities, strengthens public consultations and simplifies the analysis of collected data with powerful visualizations. |
Speakers:
Gayatri Singh, Senior Urban Development Specialist at World Bank Group
Ricardo Ochoa, Project Coordinator at CAPSUS
Carmen Valdez, Project Coordinator at CAPSUS
Marcelle Hattingh, Director: Corporate Geo-Informatics at the City of Johannesburg
Lim Liyang, Deputy Director at Singapore Land Authority