This book focuses on building regional resilience by comprehensively improving regional assets. Regional vulnerability depends on the availability of regional assets for the population, as well as the population’s ability to access those assets. Such assets include the environment, population size, community, and human capital, as well as traditional physical infrastructure. Identifying and improving these regional assets, which provide resource flows to help cope with regional disruptions—natural disasters, economic crises, or demographic changes— serves to mitigate vulnerability and build resiliency. The book pursues an interdisciplinary approach to investigating regional resilience, bringing together welfare and environmental economics, public administration, risk and disaster management, policy studies, development studies, and landscape architecture. Up-to-date case studies are provided, including recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake in Japan, regional development for depopulation areas, and urban policy for smart cities. These studies reflect and share the latest findings on key issues, policymaking and implementation processes, and implications for evaluation methodologies—all of which are indispensable to the building of resilient regions. This book is highly recommended for researchers and practitioners seeking a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to regional and urban development. It provides a valuable reference guide to building resiliency and mitigating vulnerability, both of which are imperative to achieving sustainable regions.

Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects, the third in a series, sets out to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars about the effectiveness of select policy approaches, reforms, and experiments in addressing key social and economic problems facing cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas. The chapters analyze responses to five key policy challenges that most metropolitan areas and local communities face: • Creating quality neighborhoods for families • Governing effectively • Building human capital • Growing the middle class • Enlarging a competitive economy through industry-based strategies • Managing the spatial pattern of metropolitan growth and development Each chapter discusses a specific topic under one of these challenges. The authors present the essence of what is known, as well as its likely applications, and identify the knowledge gaps that need to be filled for the successful formulation and implementation of urban and regional policy.

The mission of the Urban and Regional Policy and Its Effects series is to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars about the effectiveness of select policy approaches, reforms, and experiments in addressing the key social and economic problems facing today's cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas. Volume four of the series introduces and examines thoroughly the concept of regional resilience, explaining how resilience can be promoted—or impeded—by regional characteristics and public policies. The authors illuminate how the walls that now segment metropolitan regions across political jurisdictions and across institutions—and the gaps that separate federal laws from regional realities—have to be bridged in order for regions to cultivate resilience. Contributors: Patricia Atkins, George Washington University; Pamela Blumenthal, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; Sarah Ficenec, George Washington University; Alec Friedhoff, Brookings Institution; Kathryn Foster, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Juliet Gainsborough, Bentley University; Edward Hill, Cleveland State University; Kate Lowe, Cornell University; John Mollenkopf, Graduate Center, City University of New York; Mai Nguyen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Manuel Pastor, University of Southern California; Rolf Pendall, Urban Institute; Nancy Pindus, Urban Institute; Sarah Reckhow, Michigan State University; Travis St. Clair, George Washington University; Todd Swanstrom, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Margaret Weir, University of California, Berkeley; Howard Wial, Brookings Institution; Harold Wolman, George Washington University

The OECD Regional Outlook 2011 provides an overview of the main developments in performance among OECD regions and the challenges for regional policy after the crisis.

This book describes the urgent challenge faced by cities worldwide to become resilient to climate change impacts. This challenge goes further than the ability to resist the impacts of extreme weather conditions. Coping with climate impacts and the ability to recover from them are equally important, as well as the capacity to adapt to the effects of climate change and the ability to transform the entire urban system. The book explores how the resilience journey for coastal cities in particular encompasses using scientific knowledge but also the knowledge of citizens and practitioners. Measures and strategies on different scales are needed, from national scale all the way down to neighbourhood, street level and building level. Representing the holistic nature of climate resilience, this collection contains unique insights from leading scientists and practitioners in areas of expertise such as engineering, social sciences and urban design. It will be a valuable resource for scholars, students, practitioners and policy makers interested in the development of resilient and sustainable urban environments.

The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.

Even under the most optimistic scenarios, significant global climate change is now inevitable. While squarely confronting the scale of the risks we face, Building a Resilient Tomorrow presents replicable sustainability successes and clear-cut policy recommendations that can improve the climate resilience of communities in the US and beyond.