Barcelona, 3 June 2014: UN-Habitat’s City Resilience Profiling Programme and the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s School of Engineering have announced a new collaboration to work together in the design and construction of software to increase cities’ resilience to disasters.

One of the main objectives of this collaboration is transforming the City Resilience Profiling Tool into a more robust and user friendly Web Application with greater potential.

The software developed will generate urban resilience indicators based on data provided by the partner cities of the programme. These cities are: Balangoda (Sri Lanka), Barcelona (Spain), Beirut (Lebanon), Dagupan (Philippines), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Lokoja (Nigeria), Portmore (Jamaica), Concepción/Talcahuano (Chile), Tehran (Iran) and Wellington (New Zealand).

Speaking about the collaboration, Dan Lewis, Chief of Urban Risk Reduction at UN-Habitat said: “This is a great opportunity to start working on information technology innovations in urban resilience”.

One of the core objectives of City Resilience Profiling Programme is sharing knowledge and developing contents on urban resilience as well as providing access to tools and resources. The programme also works with different universities and online Masters courses to develop modules on urban resilience.