photo courtesy of Rebuild by Design

Since launching the 100 Resilient Cities Challenge, we have been continually reminded that individuals and small organizations can have an outsized impact on building a city’s resilience. 

Around the world, there are a number of these exceptional and dedicated entities that are coming up with innovative solutions to cities’ most pressing challenges - from waste management to food production.

RF call them Resilience Innovators. Meet four who are are working to improve environmental resilience around the world:

Zabaleen (Cairo, Egypt)

Cairo, Egypt, is a mega-city of 11 million people that generates more than 15,000 tons of garbage each day—much of which finds its way onto the streets. The city’s waste management problem is one of its most pressing.

For the past 80 years, a network of informal garbage collectors called the Zabaleen (“garbage people”) have been cleaning up the city’s trash without formal support or recognition from the Egyptian government—and sustaining themselves on what they collect. Today, 120,000 Zabaleen, mostly men, divide and conquer: many pick up trash, others run small recycling workshops, and others buy and sell waste.

Despite decades without formal government recognition, the Zabaleen are the most effective and efficient trash collectors in Cairo—picking up nearly two-thirds of the city’s rubbish each day. Today, the government is making the zabaleen’s role official—complete with uniforms and vehicles—and they are being integrated into city services. “The others have failed, be they the government or the foreign companies,” says Egypt’s environment minister. “And now [the zabaleen] should get a turn, having been sidelined for so long. They are the people who have the longest experience in refuse collection.”

Penn Design/OLIN (New York, USA)

As part of the Rebuild By Design competition, two design firms, PennDesign and OLIN, are combining their strengths in research, design, landscape architecture, and construction to create an integrated flood protection plan for one square mile of peninsula in New York City called Hunts Point.

That square mile is home to a major part of the food distribution network for 22 million people, a $5 billion annual economy, more than 20,000 jobs, and the livelihoods of people in one of the poorest congressional districts in the U.S.

The PennDesign/OLIN team’s proposal includes a flood protection levee lab that works to keeps the peninsula dry while opening up access to a waterfront greenway. They’ve envisioned new pier infrastructure that supports a federal plan to create marine highways and improve the East Coast’s disaster preparedness. Critically, the team is incorporating the community into the construction, maintenance, and research of the project—ensuring a sense of investment and an economic benefit for years to come.

Carbon Voyage (London, United Kingdom)

There are an estimated 66,000 taxis and private-hire vehicles in London, and those vehicles are empty up to 45 percent of the time—wasteful, inefficient, and bad for the environment.

Now imagine an app that marshals traffic in one of the busiest cities in the world. That’s Carbon Voyage, a UK-based firm that is applying big data toward solving London’s traffic congestion and air pollution, two multibillion-pound problems.

The app helps transport fleet drivers avoid traffic jams and waiting in long lines of vehicles going to and from trade shows. Carbon Voyage software allows drivers of large vehicles to arrive only when there is capacity for them—improving traffic flows and operational efficiencies at venues and transport hubs.

KickStart (San Francisco, USA | Nairobi, Kenya | Bamako, Mali | Dar es Salaam, Tanzania)

In Africa, 80 percent of the continent’s poor are small-scale farmers. The team at KickStart realized that with just a small plot of land and basic farming skills, irrigation would allow subsistence farmers to become commercial farmers.

They developed a line of irrigation pumps that cost as little as $35 and allow farmers to take water from a river, pond, or shallow well, pressurize it with a hose pipe, and efficiently irrigate up to two acres of farmland. Irrigation means farmers can grow crops year round at higher yields—including during the dry season when food supplies are at their lowest.

Since their founding in 1991, 150,000 businesses across Africa have started using KickStart’s irrigation tools, furthering the organization’s goal of lifting millions of people in Africa out of poverty quickly, cost-effectively, and sustainably.

> via 100resilientcities.rockefellerfoundation.org