City Resilience Department, Municipality of Milan, Italy

About

The Municipality of Milan is the local public authority responsible for delivering a large number of services across the city (education, social services, economic development). In recent years the City Government and the City Council have adopted several decisions to tackle climate change at an urban scale. The city administration is part of the 100 Resilient Cities, C40, Eurocities; it is leading the Milan “Urban Food Policy Pact Secretariat”, is one of the signatories of the Global Compact of Mayors and is now defining the “Air and Climate Plan” for a better and healthier city with horizon 2050. All these initiatives aim to increase the capacity of the city to become more sustainable, resilient, smart and circular at the local scale.

In 2015 the city of Milan joined the 100 Resilient Cities network, founded in 2013 by the Rockefeller Foundation, with the aim to help cities around the world to become more resilient to the physical, social and environmental challenges of the 21st century. Two years later, in December 2017, the City Resilience Department of Milan Municipality was officially inaugurated. The role of Milan Resilience Department is to implement strategies and plans that will redirect the city towards a future in which citizens and economies can thrive in a resilient, green and innovative atmosphere. During the first year, the Chief Resilient Officer and his team  worked, together with citizens and local stakeholders, to understand the current and perceived challenges faced by the city in terms of “shocks” and “stress”, particularly connected with climate change thematic. From this point of departure, the city resilient department has identified thematic areas in which action plans and strategies will be defined for future steps. From the release of the Preliminary Resilience Assessment of the City of Milan in December 2018, the Department worked constantly to enhance the efforts of the Municipality to take part in projects and actions involving the socio-economic-environmental sphere of urban resilience. Today there are dozens of initiatives in which the Department is involved, collected in three main research areas: Procedures and Services; Spaces and Infrastructure; Communities and Population.