Schools are more vulnerable to natural hazards than any other type of building. Worldwide, not only is most educational infrastructure underfunded and overextended, but post-disaster reconstruction often fails to meet standards for resilience.
The city of Cali, Colombia is changing that. Chief Resilience Officer Vivian Argueta is leading an ambitious intervention to overhaul the education system and its infrastructure. Under the name “My Community, My School,” the initiative aims to strengthen the educational infrastructure of Cali for early childhood education, primary, secondary and high school – with the potential to impact the resilience value of more than 50% of the city’s 342 school buildings.
To identify new solutions and practices, we convened partners from six municipal agencies and a host of subject-matter experts from around the world for a 100RC CoLab on school infrastructure resilience. The resulting report outlines a number of proposals for Cali, with implications for urban centers around the world.