“Building Urban Resilience” Workshop Results

On 26th – 27th September the ‘Building Urban Resilience’ workshop was held in Panama City as the last event in a series of three regional workshops held in Africa (Tanzania), Asia (Thailand), and the Americas (Panama). The workshop was supported by the Global Disaster Preparedness Center (GDPC) with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), with the objective of sharing learning and knowledge about building resilience in urban areas in the Americas.

This workshop brought together more than 50 participants from 16 national societies, as well as representatives from several of the Federation’s (IFRC) sub-regional offices and from the Red Cross regional and global reference centers.

The workshop was recorded and broadcast through live-streaming in the Desaprender Urban Risk Forum, with the participation of more than 470 contacts who were able to take part in all the presentations and plenary sessions with questions and comments (http://www.desaprender.org/topic/livestreaming-1).

During the course of the workshop, a range of existing work experiences within the Red Cross / Red Crescent (RC/RC) were shared, and expectations of each national society were set out in relation to how to work in urban areas using a resilience building approach.

Many of the conversations that took place during the workshop showed alignment with the progress made in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last few years in the area of Urban Risk. The workshop therefore provided continuity for a series of meetings and events held over the last few years, which analyzed the way urban risk is addressed in both theoretical and methodological terms.