Resilient Cities Shaping a Digital World

Background and Objectives

On February of 2020, during the 10th World Urban Forum (WUF) in Abu Dhabi, Visa and the Resilient Cities Network announced their partnership to help cities develop their digital infrastructure that can build and further resilience across Latin American cities. Digital transformations have gained relevance as an enabler of resilience in recent years, which has been accelerated by the pandemic as people have started changing the way they access services, interact and navigate spaces. The program “Digital Cities Shaping a Digital World”, through collaborative work, will support cities to deploy digital solutions as part of their resilience strategy, with a special focus on urban mobility as a catalyst to accelerate these changes.

The objectives of the program are:

• To increase urban resilience
• Promote inclusive digitalization
• Improve urban systems
• Promote collaborative ecosystems

Main approach

The first edition of the program was divided into three phases: understand, solve and scale. In the first phase, a study was published on the main digitalization trends in the Latin American region as well as the windows of opportunity for cities to build more resilient urban systems. In the second phase, the program worked alongside three cities, the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area in Mexico, the Quito Metropolitan District in Ecuador, and the Municipality of Salvador in Brazil. Together with the three cities, Visa and R-Cities advanced in the design and development of digital solutions to address the specific resilience challenges that these cities face in various areas such as: mobility, local commerce, employability, and education, among others. In its final phase, the program will share all knowledge acquired with other cities from the network and beyond with the publication of a playbook and an annual event with the objective of accelerating inclusive digitalization for more resilient cities.