13 October marks the 34th International Day for Disaster Reduction under the theme "Building a Resilient Future Together". In recent years, the pace of resilient city construction in China has accelerated, and many cities have put forward the goal of resilient city construction. What makes a city "resilient"? What direction does the construction of resilient cities in China need to be pursued? On the occasion of the International Day of Disaster Reduction, a reporter from the Beijing News interviewed Sun Zhanhui, an associate researcher at the Institute of Public Safety of Tsinghua University.
Sun Zhanhui, associate researcher at the Institute of Public Safety at Tsinghua University. Photo courtesy of interviewee
The construction of resilient cities in China is still in its infancy
Beijing News: The theme of the 34th International Day for Disaster Reduction is "Building a Resilient Future Together", where did "resilient cities" originate? What qualifies as "resilient"?
Sun Zhanhui: "Toughness" is a concept evolved from physics, derived from the Latin "resilio", which originally means "to return to the original state". In the early 70s of the last century, this concept was used in the study of ecosystems, and later gradually extended to areas such as socio-ecological systems. At the beginning of this century, the concept of resilience was applied to complex systems in cities, and the concept of resilient cities was born. Around 2012, mainland academia began to pay attention to resilient cities, and as the research deepened, the meaning of the concept of resilience became richer.
Resilience is at the top of the overall disaster prevention system, representing the highest level of security. In general, resilient cities refer to the ability of a city to withstand and withstand external shocks and keep its main characteristics and functions unnoticeably affected. In other words, when disasters occur, resilient cities can withstand shocks, respond quickly, recover, maintain normal urban functions, and adapt to better cope with future disaster risks. It is generally believed that resilient cities and urban planning, construction, transformation, management, culture and other aspects should achieve the five characteristics of robustness, diversity, redundancy, restoration and adaptability.
Beijing News: How is the construction of "resilient cities" in China? What are the challenges?
Sun Zhanhui: Beijing is the first city in China to include the concept of urban resilience in its master plan, and the Beijing Urban Master Plan (2016-2035) clearly proposes to "strengthen urban disaster prevention and mitigation capabilities and improve urban resilience". In 2021, the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government issued the "Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of Resilient Cities", which put forward the main measures to promote the construction of resilient cities from four aspects: overall expansion of urban spatial resilience, effective strengthening of urban engineering resilience, comprehensive improvement of urban management resilience and active cultivation of urban social resilience, and clearly proposed that by 2025, the evaluation index system and standard system of resilient cities will be basically formed, and 50 resilient communities, resilient blocks or resilient projects will be built, forming a generalizable, Replicable typical experiences of resilient city construction.
Shanghai's resilient city construction focuses on urban ecological security and operational safety, and the Shanghai Urban Master Plan (2017-2035) proposes to build a "more sustainable resilient ecological city", and puts forward resilient city construction measures from three dimensions: ecology, environmental protection and urban disaster prevention and mitigation.
In general, the construction of resilient cities in mainland China is still in its infancy, and the system has not yet been formed, and the challenges faced by resilient city construction are mainly as follows:
First, resilience and development need to be planned and considered holistically. With the continuous advancement of urbanization, the accumulation of population, construction, production and wealth has also had a magnifying effect on various disaster risks, and the comprehensive risks caused by various "urban diseases" are increasing. While optimizing urban functions and improving the efficiency of urban governance, it is increasingly important and urgent to prevent and resolve risks in urban operation and improve urban resilience.
Second, there are still weak links in urban disaster prevention, mitigation and relief. Nowadays, natural disasters are prone to high incidence, and the characteristics of multi-disaster agglomeration and disaster chain are becoming increasingly prominent. However, the mainland still has deficiencies in the overall coordination mechanism, the level of disaster-resistant fortification, and the rescue and relief capacity, and it is urgent to make up for shortcomings and strengths.
Third, there are still deficiencies in the resilience of urban infrastructure. The scale of the urban population is huge, and the load pressure of various urban infrastructure such as water, electricity, gas and heat is large, and once the urban infrastructure is damaged, it will seriously affect the social operation order and economic development. At present, the basic situation and base of urban infrastructure operation have not been fully grasped, and there are still deficiencies in monitoring and early warning of infrastructure safety operation.
In addition, grassroots basic work needs to be strengthened urgently. The grassroots level is the "last mile" of social governance and the "first kilometer" of dealing with emergencies in emergency situations. Grassroots communities on the mainland are widely distributed, with many types of disasters and hidden dangers, sudden, frequent and frequent disasters, and grassroots units are facing the actual harm of casualties and property losses.
In the future, resilient communities must be strengthened
Beijing News: What is the important role of building a "resilient city" for the safety of human life and property, social stability and economic development?
Sun Zhanhui: With the emergence of various extreme weather in recent years, the impact of various natural disasters has brought reflection to our urban construction work, which has given us a more emotional understanding and more urgent requirements for building resilient cities.
Resilient cities have become another development goal of national urban construction in the future, in order to improve the city's all-round anti-risk function, resilient cities will have the quality of "perseverance", so that urban people can gain more sense of security and happiness. Building resilient cities will help promote the overall construction of urban development and security governance. Deeply build an all-round, multi-scale, and three-dimensional resilient city, focus on the development of key technologies for urban public security, and solve problems such as dynamic monitoring of urban safety operation status, safety risk assessment, risk early warning prevention and control, and collaborative organizational structure.
The continuous and in-depth promotion of resilient cities will contribute to the development of emerging information technology, public safety technology, artificial intelligence technology and other technologies, continue to promote cutting-edge basic research and breakthroughs in key technologies, and strengthen the application of cutting-edge basic research results. In addition, the construction of resilient cities is conducive to the development of urban safety culture education system, incorporating safety culture education and training into national education, cadre education and training and spiritual civilization construction system, and carrying out all-round and regular public safety education.
Beijing News: What direction does the construction of "resilient city" in China need to move forward and work towards?
Sun Zhanhui: First of all, develop the level of resilient city construction. Community/street is the smallest organic unit of a city, a fertile soil for the development of urban safety culture and resilience concepts, and to further build a resilient city with Chinese characteristics and improve the level of urban resilience, we must mobilize the strength of the grassroots people and learn from their self-management initiative. In this regard, in the future, it is necessary to strengthen the construction of resilient communities, enhance the risk awareness of communities and residents, increase the social popularization rate of resilience concepts, and enhance community disaster prevention and mitigation capabilities.
Second, build a resilient urban risk perception foundation. Relying on sensor technology, digital technology, intelligent technology, etc., accelerate the monitoring of disaster elements in urban gas, fire protection, water affairs, forest fires, geological disasters and other fields, aggregate geographic information data, important protection target data, emergency response capacity data, disaster-bearing carrier data, monitoring video and other important data, build a data management platform for all-disaster and multi-source data fusion, deepen the integration research of disaster mechanism models, big data, artificial intelligence, etc., break through the ultra-early identification technology of disaster risks, and improve the ability to prevent hidden dangers of urban disasters. Strengthen the coordination and cooperation of all industries, fields and entities, jointly promote the construction of a risk perception system in all fields and aspects of the urban system, and achieve cost reduction, efficiency improvement and resilience of urban management.
Finally, strengthen the culture of resilience concept to the grassroots. Building a safety culture education system and improving the public safety network have become an important national policy of the mainland. It is necessary to improve the citizen safety education system, promote safety publicity into enterprises, rural areas, communities, schools, and families, cultivate a safety culture, and build a solid people's defense line for disaster prevention, mitigation and relief. In the future, to achieve high-quality development of grassroots resilient governance, it is necessary to strengthen the concept of developing resilient cities, practice resilient governance, promote resilient culture, and gradually form a good atmosphere for everyone to actively improve individual resilience, consciously practice the concept of resilient cities, and actively participate in the construction of resilient cities.
The introduction of new sensing technology has improved the real-time monitoring of urban operations
Beijing News: At present, the resilient city project in Huairou District of Beijing is under construction, what achievements have been made? What does Beijing need to focus on to promote resilient cities?
Sun Zhanhui: Huairou District has clarified the linkage mechanism and overall thinking of resilient city construction around the pain points and difficulties in urban space, engineering, management and social governance, and actively promoted the construction of application scenarios of resilient cities in monitoring and early warning, disaster prevention and mitigation, emergency rescue, urban management, and ecological environment.
The gas safety operation monitoring special project, the electric bicycle fire safety special project, the resilient city comprehensive operation monitoring center and the technology iteration platform with the most urgent demand and remarkable technical iteration results were selected as the construction content of the first phase of the project, and the resilient city comprehensive operation monitoring center was built, and the center was equipped with 7*24 hours on duty personnel, responsible for the duty of gas, fire protection, forest fire prevention and disaster monitoring systems, to meet the unified management needs of resilient city operation monitoring. Meet the construction scope and business management requirements of each resilient city special scenario.
The general idea of "3+3+N" for the construction of flexible cities: the first "3" is "1 center - resilient city operation management and monitoring command center", "1 platform - resilient city business platform" and "1 network - all-factor three-dimensional intelligent perception network". The second "3" is to build a high-level, professional resilient city operation service and decision-making support service team; High-end R&D resources in the field of polymer joint sensing, to create an iterative technology platform with a core technology core; Build an industrial development ecosystem with a virtuous cycle. "N" is a special project for resilient urban application scenarios such as gas safety, fire protection, geological disasters, forest fire prevention, waterlogging and ecological environment detection.
The next step of the construction of application scenarios of Huaiflexible City includes gas safety, land disaster monitoring, fire safety, flood warning, public security policing and other special projects. In my opinion, Beijing needs to promote the construction of a resilient city in terms of global perception, intelligent perception, full-scenario coverage, and improvement of public service capabilities.
Beijing News: In recent years, technology empowerment has accelerated the construction of resilient cities.
Sun Zhanhui: The introduction of new sensing technology has greatly improved the accuracy, reliability and real-time monitoring of urban operation, which can better understand the operation status of the city, and make it possible to dynamically analyze the resilience level of the city, such as laser methane gas sensors, quantum dot environmental quality monitoring sensors, ultra-high-definition ultra-wide-angle video surveillance systems, etc.; Artificial intelligence technology is used to intelligently analyze various sensor monitoring data, improve the accuracy of resilient city monitoring and early warning, reduce the false alarm rate, reduce manual work, and improve efficiency. GIS and 3D systems provide tools that can greatly improve resilient urban planning.
Beijing News reporter Zhan Shengjie
Edited by Fan Yijing Proofread by Zhao Lin
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