David Simon and Resilient Cities in the Global South

Resilient cities in the Global South are those that manage to anticipate, absorb and recover from climate impacts, floods, droughts, heat, storms, in contexts of rapid growth, widespread informality and scarce resources, and their study is the specialism of the British geographer David Simon, professor of development geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Simon directed between 2014 and 2019 the Mistra Urban Futures centre in Gothenburg, a research network across cities in Sweden, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Kenya, and edited Rethinking Sustainable Cities: Accessible, Green and Fair (2016), where he proposes measuring urban sustainability by three criteria at once: accessibility, greenness and fairness.

The Global South asymmetry: fewer emissions, more impacts

His starting point is an asymmetry. Cities of the Global South contribute a small fraction of historical emissions and suffer most of the impacts, because they spread over floodplains, hillsides and coasts, because much of their population lives in self-built settlements without drainage or services and because their local governments have little fiscal and technical capacity. Simon documented in East and Southern Africa how the floods of Nairobi or Dar es Salaam or the droughts of Cape Town hit informal neighbourhoods first, and how adaptation plans imported from the North, with their dykes and insurance, do not fit that reality.

Co-production of knowledge: the Mistra Urban Futures method

His most cited methodological contribution is the co-production of knowledge. At Mistra Urban Futures, researchers, municipal officials and community organisations worked together from the definition of the problem to the application of solutions, instead of the university studying and the city receiving. Simon holds that resilience is not designed from above: those who live in a flood-prone neighbourhood know where the water rises, which paths get cut off and which support networks work, and that information is as necessary as climate models. Participation is a technical condition of adaptation, not a democratic add-on.

SDG 11 and the critique of global indicators

Simon also took part in the design of Sustainable Development Goal 11, on inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities, and coordinated in 2015 the piloting of its indicators in five cities on three continents. That experience led him to criticise global frameworks that measure all cities by the same yardstick: indicators demanding data many cities lack, targets that ignore informality and a notion of resilience that sometimes serves to justify evicting settlements from risk zones without offering an alternative. His proposal is to adapt indicators to each context and to measure also who wins and who loses from each intervention.

Just resilience: mitigating and adapting at once

The just resilience Simon defends combines mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation because Southern cities are growing and their decisions today on transport, energy and urban form lock in emissions for decades; adaptation because the impacts are already there. The measures that work are those that do both: in situ upgrading of settlements with drainage and public space, collective transport that cuts emissions and connects peripheries, green infrastructure that cools and retains water, and early warning systems built with communities. Freetown, with its chief heat officer, and Durban, with its community adaptation programme, are examples Simon has followed.

Simon's lesson is that climate resilience in the Global South is not a reduced version of the North's but a different problem, with its own actors, knowledge and priorities. It requires recognising the informal city as part of the solution, co-producing knowledge with those who live the risks and measuring success by the justice of the outcome and not only by the infrastructure built. A city that protects its most vulnerable neighbourhoods is, in his definition, the only one that can call itself resilient.