As I watched Bangkok’s resilience strategy launched in February under the bright lights of the Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre, I reflected on the city of my birth and what this strategy I worked on for three years might mean for it.

Bangkok is a city of contrasts. It is a vivid, fast-paced metropolis, bursting with modern buildings and infrastructure and international goods and cuisines. It is also an ancient city of historic buildings and temples, shrines covered in marigolds, and Patongko vendors dispensing donuts and warm soy milk to commuters jostling for their breakfast. As a child, I saw the city’s endemic shocks, like flooding and power outages, and stresses, like endless traffic, as part of a colourful adventure rather than the constant, grating disruptions they really were.

Over the last four decades, Thailand’s economy has grown remarkably, moving from a low-income country to an upper-middle-income country in less than a generation. But not everyone makes it to those malls of luxury goods. Of her siblings, my mother was the only one who found opportunity abroad. My aunts and uncles lived hard lives as street vendors, hospitality workers, and in the army. Access to economic opportunities is still unequal, and many Bangkok residents still live in informal settlements and in poverty.

Even though Bangkok now has a sky rail and mass rapid transport system, its population has increased more in the last decade than in the preceding three decades combined, overwhelming whatever public transport is currently available. By 2020, the population of the city is expected to grow to 15 million. The traffic is still atrocious, and getting anywhere on time takes a significant amount of planning.

Floods in 2011 caused around USD 47 billion worth of damage. There have been numerous coups d’état in Thailand in recent decades, evidence of deep-seated political tensions. Since May 2014, Thailand has been under military rule. But if you didn’t pick up the Bangkok Post once in a while, you’d be forgiven for not knowing. The Thai brand of military rule is fairly inconspicuous.

Resilient Bangkok is the first document that looks comprehensively across all of these core problems and suggests integrated actions that will provide multiple benefits. The strategy focuses on three action areas: increasing quality of life; reducing disaster risk and increasing adaptation to natural hazards; and driving a strong and competitive economy.

Each action area re-examines long-standing problems in a more creative and collaborative way. For example, Bangkok is re-examining its approach to water management so it can improve resilience to floods. The city plans to move away from the dominance of grey infrastructure, such as pipes and pumps, and explore how green and blue infrastructure can provide amenity and recreational values while retaining water and acting as a flood buffer. Actions under this goal include a catchment management strategy and vision for the Lower Chao Phraya Basin, a community water resource management program, and improving urban flood defences. Developing new recreational parks and green space along riverside promenades while complement these actions.

One day, when I take my future children to the city of my childhood, I hope they will find a place where it’s enjoyable to be outside, with clean air and water and fewer cars, where people are protected from disaster and have equal access to opportunity. This strategy marks an important step toward that future, and while implementation will not be easy, I have no doubt that Bangkokians will greet the task ahead like they greet most things, with a smile.

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When I started working for the Victorian Government’s security and emergency management branch in the summer of 2010, a third of the state was underwater. These floods, some of the worst in the state’s history, came after a 14-year drought and the 2009 “Black Saturday” bushfires that claimed almost 200 lives and 2,132 homes. There was even a plague of locusts.

Communities struggled; some would never return to their homes. Whole councils went bankrupt. Royal commissions and government inquiries tried to make sense of the devastation: ‘Where did it all go wrong?’

Creating the Community Resilience Framework was a key action of the Victorian Government’s 2015-2018 Strategic Action Plan. Resilience can be a nebulous thing; it means different things to different people. Victoria’s communities are diverse—whether it’s where we were born or where we live now, the reality of life in Victoria can be vastly different. Like our communities, our emergency management sector is also broad, including more than 60 organisations officially identified in Victoria’s Emergency Management Manual and many more that ultimately become involved before, during and after emergencies.

The intent of creating the framework was to articulate a shared vision for the emergency management sector so that communities, government, business, industry and non-government organisations can work in alignment and draw on one another’s strengths.

The Community Resilience Framework found a strong partner in the Resilient Melbourne Strategy, which ArchTam worked with 100 Resilient Cities and the City of Melbourne to develop. Published in May 2015, the strategy represents a collaborative effort across 32 local councils, hundreds of local organisations, and departments in the Victorian State Government to build the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses and systems within the city to survive, adapt and grow, no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience.

The Community Resilience Framework became one of the strategy’s three flagship actions, acknowledging its potential to move the metropolitan city towards a shared vision in which Melbourne’s diverse communities are viable, sustainable, liveable and prosperous, today and for the long term.

Since the release of the Resilient Melbourne Strategy, ArchTam has continued working with The Victorian Government to develop the Community Resilience Framework. The framework is designed to ensure that organisations put communities at the centre of decision making and connect with them to better understand their values, priorities and strengths. It cultivates shared responsibility, recognising that while the government should lead some actions, communities should lead others, such as local networking and organising, which is vital to their resilience. In turn, organisations can draw from the vast potential for dynamic community contributions and don’t have to do everything themselves.

The framework targets seven broad community resilience outcomes, adapted from extensive research on community well being at the McCaughey Institute here in Melbourne. These are:

• Connective, inclusive and empowered
• Dynamic and diverse local economy
• Sustainable built and natural environment
• Culturally rich and vibrant
• Democratically engaged
• Reflective and aware

Broad and meaningful consultation has helped ensure that the framework is relevant to communities and the emergency management sector alike and is based on global best practices in community resilience, well being and disaster risk reduction. The Community Resilience Framework is scheduled to be launched and piloted in March 2017.

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