Resilience Planning Under Information Scarcity in Fast Growing African Cities and Towns: The CityRAP Approach

Urban planners seeking to enhance resilience contend with the complexity of interdependent systems and severe gaps in data and information. This complexity-capacity gap is most evident in smaller, rapidly growing cities. Experience in Africa shows these are also the cities where most risk is accruing and where the majority of population growth is felt. Bridging this gap to build resilience requires new decision-support tools that can operate on data that is not comprehensive but good enough. This paper examines the prospect for such a generation of tools to enable decisions that can build resilience that also enhance inclusive decision-making processes. It draws from the experience of the City Resilience Action Planning Tool, developed by UN-Habitat and shows how this or other similar tools can: build local government capacity; attract additional investment; contribute to longer-term processes of legislative reform; generate cooperation between communities and local government, and; work across power dynamics and open space for further collaboration.