For six years, the 100 Resilient Cities program explored how municipal governments could boost their capacity for urban resilience. The Rockefeller Foundation launched the program in 2013 to support the transformation of public institutions, functions, and operations in 100 cities around the globe, with the goal of enabling them to“survive, adapt, and grow in the face of chronic stresses and acute shocks.” The program embraced a holistic definition of resilience that extends beyond responding to individual emergencies, factoring in the economic, social, and physical challenges cities continue to face, including climate change, migration, conflicts, and global pandemics. This vision of urban resilience addresses ongoing “stressors” such as poverty, inequality, and access to basic services as much as it does the hazard events that exacerbate them.

The Urban Institute monitored and evaluated 100 Resilient Cities’ core features over the program’s duration and produced a final report focusing on outcomes across a 21-city sample. Although the 100 Resilient Cities program ended earlier than anticipated, its unprecedented breadth provided lessons that cities across the world can learn from. The below products summarize our evaluation of the program and forecast how its lessons on urban resilience may be applied to local, regional, and national governments moving forward.

Publications

• Urban Resilience: From Global Vision to Local Practice
• Urban Resilience: Executive Summary
• The Rise of the Chief Resilience Officer: Lessons from 100 Resilient Cities
• Multidimensional Resilience: Building Resilience across the Physical, Economic, and Social Domains
• Institutionalizing Urban Resilience: A Midterm Monitoring and Evaluation Report of 100 Resilient Cities