Assessing Singapore's social resilience
10 Jan | How do we measure social resilience in Singapore? The question brought diverse stakeholders from Singapore’s government agencies to a workshop by Future Resilient Systems.
The workshop, jointly organised by Future Resilient Systems (FRS) and the Centre for Liveable Cities (CLC), is part of an ongoing multi-stakeholder project on Building Community Resilience by Design. It was supported by the Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk and Participate in Design.
It brought 55 stakeholders from various Singaporean agencies together to discuss how to define and measure social and community resilience in Singapore.
The segment on defining social and community resilience included a keynote speech by Prof. Daniel Aldrich from the Northeastern University, who provided valuable inputs on how communities bond and become cohesive. A rich picture exercise was conducted to better understand how representatives of government agencies think Cambridge Road (a neighbourhood in Singapore) could become more resilient against climate-related risks.
An interesting insight from the workshop was that measures to improve the liveability of residents in Cambridge Road, such as urban gardening and community events, also produced positive side effects in terms of increasing bonding between residents. Increased interaction between residents in the Cambridge Road neighbourhood may help to build and strengthen their social resilience in the long-term.