Place Based Approach to plan for Resilient Cities: a local government perspective

Local government have a pivotal role in city planning. However, meeting the conflicting priorities such as plan for urbanization, promote economic prosperity, ensure environmental sustainability besides creating safe, vibrant and liveable places, create major challenges for local administration. While rapid urbanization continue to displace people from their local places, the frequency of disaster events at the local scale and increasing disaster risks place unique challenges on people and their places. This emphasises the need for local government to understand the local places and invest in planning for cities that improve resilience and enhance human connectivity to their places. Meeting these multidimensional needs in local spaces require embedding local and scientific knowledge, past experiences and community expectation to plan and design cities that also deliver multiple social outcomes. Both place-based approach to city planning and creating disaster resilient cities have gathered momentum, however, they continue to occur in isolation. Maximizing these multiple social, environmental and economic outcomes, emphasize the need to align both resilience principles for sustainable urbanization and place based approach planning concepts to plan for places for people. Drawing from these principles and organizational change theory, a conceptual framework is proposed that provide a new lens for local government to plan for place based resilient cities. This place based approach for resilient cities framework incorporates the thinking for change as a dynamic process across the time scales and by understanding the relationship between people and their place. The model proposed is in an Australian context, yet has significant implication for communities at all levels when planning for places for people.