Urban Resilience Strategy

Planning for urgent needs without losing sight of the future
Ukrainian cities are making urgent decisions about housing, critical infrastructure, economic recovery and investment while facing major uncertainty about the future.
The challenge is not only to respond to immediate needs, but to understand how today’s decisions will shape a city in five, ten or twenty years. A short-term solution can have long-term consequences for demographics, mobility, ecology, the economy and the spatial development of a city.Ro3kvit’s Urban Resilience Framework helps municipalities connect these different timescales and understand how challenges across sectors influence one another.
The process starts with research into the local context and looks at the city from two connected perspectives: its immediate needs and its longer-term challenges and opportunities. A needs assessment helps identify short-term priorities, while a SWOT analysis considers longer-term perspectives. These insights are brought together in an Urban Resilience Strategy, where overarching principles are translated into goals and concrete projects.
At the core of the framework is the connection between decisions made today and their consequences for the future. Immediate action should respond to current needs without limiting opportunities for positive long-term development.
Fulco Treffers: “In many war-affected cities, we have seen urgent solutions create new problems in the medium and long term, from unhealthy housing and unsafe infrastructure to greater social inequality. In Ukraine, we try to find a balance between responding quickly to urgent needs and creating opportunities for positive long-term change. If an energy plant is destroyed, for example, rebuilding the same system may not always be the best solution. Decentralised energy systems can be faster to build, harder to destroy and more resilient to future climate risks. An Urban Resilience Strategy helps cities think through these choices before urgent decisions have to be made.”

How the strategy helps cities move forward
A strategy becomes useful when it can guide real decisions.
The Urban Resilience Framework has been developed and tested through Ro3kvit’s work with Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Kryvyi Rih and Kamianske, adapting the approach to the different challenges and priorities of each city.
Each Urban Resilience Strategy translates its goals and principles into a portfolio of tangible projects. This allows municipalities, financial institutions and potential funders to see how individual project proposals respond to the challenges identified in the analysis and contribute to the city’s broader strategic goals.
In Kryvyi Rih, the strategy has been used to inform municipal strategic documents and help prioritise actions. The project portfolio can be regularly updated as priorities and circumstances change, while individual projects can be transferred to DREAM or adapted for funding applications.
Sofiia Bondar, urbanist at Ro3kvit: This methodology is for all municipalities to use. We are happy to share it. If requested, our urbanists can play a role in the research, participation and strategical planning steps. Or we can give trainings on how to use this method - in more detail.