Like a security service, resilience is hard to define and measure. Is one company or site more resilient or secure than another? A property firm has – for business reasons – set about ranking cities on their resilience.
That firm is Grosvenor, the property managers. They ranked some 50 cities from Amsterdam to Zurich and on all the world’s main continents. They judged three Canadian cities – Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary to be most resilient; and Cairo, Jakarta and Dhaka as the least resilient. Kate Brown, group sustainability director at the company, detailed the study at the World Cities conference at the British Library conference centre in London in October. London, the only UK city ranked, was of middling resilience, on a par with Frankfurt and Sydney. Less resilient was Dublin. The weakest 20 cities were in ‘emerging markets’ such as Mexico, India, China and Brazil.
What’s the good?
What good does this do to security managers, and why is it any good? It rates a city by its vulnerability, and what the researchers term ‘adaptive capacity’. Vulnerabilities include the climate (rising sea levels), basic needs such as housing, resources such as water, and air pollution and urban sprawl. Strictly security matters such as crime, terrorism and corruption also count. Grosvenor admits it can apply the research – which lets you compare one place with another – to decide where to invest, whether for the short or long term. If yields are lower, as in London, is the real estate firm in fact better off deploying its capital there, as it’s a more resilient city, than, say, Manila, even though over a few years it will give you a better yield? Not that London scores so well compared with some near-neighbours such as Amsterdam, Zurich and Stockholm. Crime, and particularly terrorism, were flagged up in the study, and a lack of affordability in housing, in London.
United States
Cities in the United States score quite badly on vulnerability – including social tension thanks to inequality. However the US cities do score well on ‘adaptive capacity’. In other words, when a coastal or low-lying city such as New York is hit by Hurricane Sandy (or London by the August 2011 rioting), it’s quick to get back on its feet. European cities by comparison have ageing infrastructure which needs retro-fitting. Canadian cities came out in the study, in the words of Kate Brown, ‘very well indeed’; they are well governed and planned. Interesting from a geopolitical point of view was that the researchers regarded democracy as good for a city, making for a more cohesive and sustainable society. The likes of Rio de Janeiro (though it’s hosting the 2016 Olympics), Delhi and Mumbai, already have inequality, poor infrastructure, and a degraded environment, which make them least resilient already; and they are seeing and can expect big rises in population. While she admitted that it was ‘far from an exact science’, evidently Grosvenor have taken time and spent money on it, as a guide to how risky it is, wherever they put their capital. Or as they put it, ‘pursuing real estate business without an eye to the stability of the underlying communities has little meaning’.
High stakes
The stakes, then, are high – if a city cannot thrive, whether because it’s riven by petty crime or is unsafe because of flooding thanks to climate change, you have a pay a higher price to do business there. That was in evidence at the two-day event organised by the business group London First, going by the high calibre of speakers, such as James de Labilliere, head of war, terrorism and political violence at the insurer Hiscox; Sir David Venness, the former senior Met Police man, who chairs London First’s security and resilience network; another senior former Met officer, Janet Williams, who now works for Interpol and who is a security adviser to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar; Chris Tomlinson, consultant at engineering firm Arup; Hugh Eaton, director, government and national security, Cisco UK; and Matt Maer, group security director, Canary Wharf Group.
Pictured: The British Museum in London.
