Barcelona City Council continues to take innovative steps to increase its urban resilience, this time through a multi-partner workshop on its forthcoming resilience strategy with participation from international organizations, including UN-Habitat.

Over the past year, Barcelona has been carrying out an operational plan that aims to create a framework and roadmap to deploy the main lines of action in the city and address risks and challenges related to resilience. The Resilience Department is hosting a series of workshops with various city council departments and multiple partners to develop a resilience strategy for the city and promote a holistic approach to resilience-building.

Barcelona is eager to share with and learn from the most advanced initiatives and programmes working in this area at the globe scale, and invited technicians from two international working partners (100 Resilient Cities and UN-Habitat’s City Resilience Profiling Programme) to contribute to the process. The two-day workshop (2-3 July) allowed technicians to sit together and gather inputs and lessons learned from the innovative work of Barcelona and share ideas and approaches from the latest tools and methodologies being developed by these leading international organizations.

Ms. Ares Gabàs, Head of Resilience Department of Barcelona City Council, highlighted the great opportunity that these sessions offer as a starting point to join efforts, reflections and ideas, and keep advancing on the resilience strategy. Throughout the workshop, all partners were conscious of the need for this work to contribute to the achievement at the local level of global targets and frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals, notably SDG 11.