Over the past decade, resilience has been gaining ever greater prominence in the international development discourse, emerging as one of the core principles of sustainable urban development in the post-MDGs framework. Between 2015 and 2016, resilience featured as an important theme across six major global agendas: notably the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the World Humanitarian Summit Commitments to Action and the New Urban Agenda. The latter, which was formulated in Quito on occasion of the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III – October 2016), and signed by 167 countries, sets the global standard for achievement in sustainable urban development for the next two decades.

The publication’s purpose is to account for this unprecedented global momentum for resilience-building from an urban standpoint: inquiring the trends that drive the theory, investigating how these were gradually incorporated in development agendas, mapping the diverse landscape of actors involved, and analysing how this perspective shift can be translated into forward-looking urban policies and practices. As follows, the document is framed across five main chapters

From February 16th–18th, the city of Puebla, Mexico hosted Smart City Expo Puebla, bringing together over 80 businesses and 36 Latin American Countries under the common goal of a more sustainable, healthy and equitable future for Mexican and Latin American cities. As part of the event, the Smart City World Expo Congress featured over 100 speakers.

The CRPP is delivering the following four accomplishments:

1. Research on Operational Framework: An adaptable urban systems model suitable for all human settlements.
2. Indexing and Profiling: A set of indicators, standards, and profiles to support cities for calibrating urban systems’ ability to withstand and recover from crises.
3. Tools/Software Development: Software systems that produce city resilience profiles, from which Resilience Action Plans are derived.
4. Normative Guidance: Global standards set for urban resilience at different levels from local policies based on the Resilience Action Plans to national policies including the states’ competence towards new resilience standards.

The City Resilience Profiling Programme (CRPP) focuses on providing national and local governments with tools for measuring and increasing resilience to multi-hazard impacts, including those associated with climate change. Working through partnerships with stakeholders including international agencies such as UNISDR, academic and research institutes, private sector actors, and NGOs, the CRPP will develop a comprehensive and integrated urban planning and management approach for profiling and monitoring the resilience of any city to all plausible hazards.

The CRPP goes beyond conventional approaches to ‘risk reduction,’ delivering a forward-looking, multi-scale, multi-sectoral, multi-hazard, multistakeholder model for building resilience that recognizes the complexities and unique value of cities, and the inherent interdependencies of each part of an urban system. Launching in Quito during the Habitat III conference, UN Habitat’s global Urban Resilience Programme includes the CRPP as its analytic approach to transforming urban planning, development and governance to build resilient human settlements, as well as its normative work on network stewardship, including as recently announced the Chairing of the UNISDR Making Cities Resilience Campaign Steering Committee; standards development with UN and ISO partners; an applied research platform engaging the URP Academic Network; and other operational projects with partner cities and countries.