OPINION OUR VOICE AS ONE What should the institutions contribution be to the resilience of our cities? Susie Diamond makes an impassioned appeal to CIBSE Members with vision, passion and a story to share, to contribute to a collection of essays on the issues and challenges of future city design Susie Diamond is a partner at Inkling, and vice-chair of CIBSE Resilient Cities Group The ideas may be ignored or, ultimately, may make their way into our thought processes I was drawn to join the new CIBSE Resilient Cities Group through a funky mixture of curiosity and pessimism about the future of our urban environments. Cities around the world have been evolving for centuries, at an ever-increasing pace. What they will look and feel like to inhabit in even 50 years time is hard to imagine. A large proportion of our current buildings will probably remain, but they will be interspersed with many new ones and the way well be using them could be very different. Some of this change could be really exciting, but I am troubled by the uncertainties of climate change and what the implications might be for future generations of city dwellers. How will we manage to maintain the standards of comfort we are used to, and keep using the technology we value, without exacerbating climate change? When this group got together, we quickly realised that writing a definitive guide for CIBSE members on adapting and designing resilient cities was not a realistic proposition. A great deal of work is being done across many sectors to plan and future gaze on this subject. Organisations such as The BRE Trust Future Cities Programme, the C40 Cities Group and the Future Cities Catapult are just the tip of the iceberg. So we felt a more useful remit was to start collating and disseminating the information already out there that is most relevant to CIBSE members. In this way we can begin to create some thought leadership on what our contribution to the resilience of our cities should be. The Cabinet Office definition of resilience is the ability of assets, networks and systems to anticipate, absorb, adapt to and/or rapidly recover from a disruptive event. In its broader sense, it is more than an ability to bounce back and recover from adversity, and extends to the broader adaptive capacity gained from an understanding of the risks and uncertainties in our environment. One dissemination avenue that the Resilient Cities Group is pursuing has been inspired by a book edited by Angela Brady, past president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and director of Brady Mallalieu Architects. Entitled The British Papers: Current Thinking on Sustainable City Design (RIBA Publishing), it is a collection of 31 essays covering a wide variety of topics and themes that give diverse personal perspectives on the issues and challenges of future city design. The contributors are largely from an architectural background, and their pieces are illustrated, short and relevant. Its a really good read. So why not develop the theme and build a similar collection of essays with a CIBSE focus? We know lots of interesting people within the industry people with vision and passion; people with a story to share or a new technology to develop. Climate modelling has given us a good idea of where the Earths climate is heading, but there is a wealth of opinion about how this will affect us, and how our cities will adapt and evolve to suit conditions in the late 21st and 22nd centuries. Hearing these voices would be inspiring, thought-provoking or even enraging. The ideas presented may be ignored and forgotten or might take hold and, ultimately, make their way into our thought processes and the way we practice our work. Without the resources (yet) to publish a physical book, we are inviting essayists to write pieces to be published on the group blog as part of a series that will build up over the coming months. If you are interested in contributing to this, please get in touch with us at resilientcities@cibse.org