We need calls for resilience, not fiscal restraint
City resilience is hard to obtain and expensive to maintain, fiscally conservative approaches to it are a false economy
Looking back, we may decide that 2022 really was the poster year of the polycrisis. There are some good candidates in the twentieth century as well, but few others turned out to be the unenviable cocktail of war in Europe, continued lockdowns in China, and rising inflation and interest rates globally. Stir with increasingly frequent extreme weather events. Serve at least 1°C warmer than 1880.
Despite the fresh reminder the pandemic offered in 2020 that collaborative and dynamic national and city governments are the most effective at facing sudden challenges, the lessons on the importance of building public sector’s long-term flexibility appear to have already been forgotten. In fact, the incoming global economic slowdown is being greeted with renewed calls for fiscal restraint. In other words, austerity.
Where does this leave cities? We already know that they are leading on climate action, but they are increasingly being asked to ‘fix’ market failures—as they support residents struggling with rising food and energy costs, they remain on the frontline for 2023’s challenge: a broad-based economic slowdown exacerbated by inflation at levels most countries have not experienced in decades, while central banks are hiking interest rates.
A city’s resilience determines its capacity to respond to shocks and stresses: natural disasters, economic crises, demographic changes, and health epidemics, among others. This capacity is developed over time, though assessing it is complex. Practically and politically, resilience is hard and expensive to maintain at the city level over time. National governments tend to push in the opposite direction—towards the lowest cost solutions. In fact, the social benefits of excess capacity and built-in flexibility are rarely considered to justify their higher running costs in the public sector.
The assumption is that by cutting costs, national governments gain the fiscal headroom to act decisively in times of crisis. In practice, by starving the public sector, including cities where funded directly, national governments are cutting the supply lines to their first responders. Some governments and institutions understand the need for resilience. Others continue to recommend austerity measures, even in anticipation of turbulent times. They would do better by recognizing that resilient cities are essential and provide the political and financial support to make it happen.
What am I reading?
The Climate Issue of the New Yorker magazine.
Adrienne Buller’s critique of ‘green capitalism’ in The Value of a Whale
Below, a good-news story of large scale adaptation, photographed by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite. Riddled by years of controversies due to its spiralling construction costs, Venice’s flood barriers (MOSE) protected the city from the highest tides ever recorded in the northern Adriatic Sea on November 22nd, 2022.
Credit: European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery