Asian cities grown so rapidly face a growing range of adversities and challenges in 21st century : from the impact of climate change to growing migrant populations to inadequate infrastructure to pandemics to cyber-attacks. Challenge is made even harder by the stresses of climate change, which is bringing more extreme weather, from floods to heat waves, and higher sea levels that threaten coastal cities. In developing countries, the migrants from rural areas often end up in slums or residential areas with poor housing, now home to nearly one billion people across the world, where many live in poverty. While this region is physically and socio-economically diverse, its cities share many of the same challenges and need to be more resilient to these impacts that are growing parts in these days.
Urban resilience, been defined as the capability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from significant multi-hazard threats with minimum damage to public safety and health, the economy, and security of urban area(Wilbanks 2007), has an increasing attention to the capability to adapt to changing conditions. The major resilience challenges of our era, such as poverty reduction, natural hazards and climate change, environmental sustainability, and social inclusion, enriched with cultural understandings too. Mass density of people makes them especially vulnerable both to the impacts of acute disasters and the slow, creeping effects of the changing climate; all making resilience planning critically important. At the same time, growing urbanization over the past century has been associated with a considerable increase in urban sprawl.
In many of Asian countries, especially developing countries such as India, Indonesia etc, Natural Disaster Prevention, Infrastructure for Flooding, Food Security, Nutrition and also loss of agricultural land, waterbodies, etc. are still key issues.
Resilience requires cities to take transformative actions that make cities better, in both the short- and long-term, and allow cities to not only endure, but thrive, in both good times and bad. Collaboration between cities as well as partnership with the private sector also can create scalable solutions to begin to address these challenges and solutions. Therefore, the holistic lens will be considered to meet the needs of the Asian peri-urbanization. It is also trans-disciplinary, with a working group that includes scholars in a number of disciplines including urban planning, architecture, social and environmental science.
