Session chairs

Prof. Dr. Daphne Mah, Director, Asian Energy Studies Centre, Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, daphnemah@hkbu.edu.hk

Prof. Dr. Liling Huang, Graduate Institute of Building and Planning, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, liling@ntu.edu.tw

Summary

This session focused on safeguarding resilience of places facing global challenges, with a special lens on how technical tools, such as ICT, could help to enhance the capacity to do so. The seven presentations covered case studies from cities and regions in Indonesia, Japan, China and Spain. With presenters from Asia, Europe and other regions, there was thus a good cross-cultural discussion. Not every paper addressed the technology perspective equally, but all papers together did provide us with rich information and dynamic perspectives on understanding how urban and regional resilience could be created in different social and geographic contexts.

Despite the various backgrounds of the empirical case studies, one commonality they shared was that both, dialogues between local entities, communities and government, and collaboration across spatial scales play a key role in a new form of governance aiming at urban resilience. This was well demonstrated by cases like the regional Ocean corridor in Indonesia, forest co-management by local governments and the business sector in China, scenario development through engaging stakeholders for climate changes in Spain, and accelerating the update of renewable energy through engaging citizens in Japan. They delivered some positive messages regarding our ability to build a world that can cope with the challenges of the Anthropocene. However, the current usage of big data and ICT still remain problematic - ways by which they could serve as tools for actually empowering citizens and help to envision a just city still await further research, as well as innovative practices.