Interview: Sebastien Maire, Chief Resilience Officer, Paris

Barbara Szewcow spoke to Sebastien Maire, Chief Resilience Officer, Paris about the launch of the city’s first resilience strategy

What was your role in planning the strategy and what did you find the most challenging?

Both are totally related. A really innovative position within the city government which is the Chief Resilience Officer is a cross-cutting position.

The main role was to take the best of all the policies from the city departments already in place, and to try to articulate them within a vision that touches on the main risks and opportunities that the city is supposed to face in the coming decades. That was my role and, at the same time, that was the most important challenge because our local government and our organisations in general are used to work inside laws. The resilient approach is efficient because, for instance: if we can sum it up, the two main challenges are climate change and social inequity, and what the resilience approach proposes is to link both. To invent solutions that are goals for both and this is quite innovative.

Was there anything that really surprised you about your role?

The first thing was the interest shown by my colleagues from the City Hall. The engineers for instance who are trained and used to work with specific matters: water engineers are specialised and are used to work with water issues, the same goes for another one working on energy and so on. The resilience approach shows that both professions are related. It is positive for the engineers themselves. Thanks to the resilience approach they have seen their jobs differently.

I didn’t expect that to be honest. I thought that the reaction, you know, the classical way of developing public projects would be very strong. But no, most of the people within the city were very interested in it and ready to change and to work differently and this is a really good surprise.

How did your work with different departments?

We consulted more than 800 different stakeholders. I had one to one interviews and we set up many workshops with people from several departments; we used design thinking and the type of techniques that are not really developed in the city but people really liked them.

We also consulted the studies and surveys that had already been released by the city. Each city department is managing, on a daily basis, many different surveys on various topics but they don’t really share that with other departments.

External stakeholders were really important as well. We are talking about the private sector; we involved companies, real estate agencies, insurers, environmental companies and others. Big companies that are really interested in the approach. Also, infrastructure providers, whether public or private, for: transport, communication, water, energy or sewage. They were really involved in the consultation and in co-building of the strategy.

We worked a lot with NGOs which are trying to develop new links between neighbours. The neighbourhood is a really important scale for us, for this strategy, and we strongly believe that strengthening the relationship, on a daily basis, between neighbours is really a key for resilience.

Through the NGOs we could consult the citizens because all the NGOs are composed of volunteering citizens.

The last big category is academia. We have been working with 40 different schools, scientific labs, and researchers. This is very important for us to benefit as much as possible from research and so we involved the researchers in following and evaluating our action plan.

 You have highlighted the importance of involving Parisians in order to build a resilient society. Could you give an example of how the citizens will be involved in the implementation of the strategy?

The first example I can give is when right after the terrorist attack in 2015 the reaction of Parisians was naturally very resilient because Parisians called for unity, solidarity and no hate. We decided to build on this. Our City Hall created the citizen card, the same model as the New York City one.

We now have more than 150,000 owners of the citizen card to whom we are going propose to be part of the implementation of the strategy. We are going to create a network of super citizens or people who agree to be trained for first aid programmes. We are using an example of CERT (Community Emergency Response Teams) from New York City.

I want to mention the fact that the whole strategy and strength of this programme has been built, not only but also, thanks to institutions of the networks and some other cities. Of course, we never copy-paste the solutions from one city to another one because contexts are different, cultures are different but the main goal, the main inspiration, can really feed our reflections and it is useful. For example, you convince people from City Hall that this action could be possible because Rotterdam did it or Bristol did it. Why not Paris? This is a very powerful argument to use examples from the networks.

The Paris Resilience Strategy is a big project. Consequently, it requires a serious financial plan. Could you tell me what is the budget allocated for it?

Yes. At first, the mayor during COP21, signed the pledge with other mayors from 100 Resilient Cities to commit at least 10 percent each year, of the investment budget, for resilience. But this is a big number, it doesn’t say much about the details. Political commitment is important. For instance, the budget for the city of Paris for six years’ investment is €10 billion so it is already €1 billion that the mayor committed investing into resilience.

But, most of the time, this is not extra money. For instance, for the schoolyards I am going to use the budget that is already dedicated to schoolyards. However, we are going to do it differently, using the same money and, as we are going to have a holistic approach, serving different policies: water, energy, bio-diversity and others. That’s the strength of the resilience approach.

I have been working for years in sustainable development and I remember that if you wanted your building to be sustainable, you had to add 20 percent to the budget. The resilience approach is different. With the same budget, you can serve more policies and have more benefit so there is no extra cost.

Of course, at the beginning we need a bit of extra cash for engineering because it is a new way but once we have the model, it doesn’t cost a lot. That’s really the strength of the new approach. I don’t have a dedicated budget for resilience and I don’t want any. I don’t have a huge team with 30 people either. It should be cross-cutting so I’m working with all the departments but I’m not a department, and this is very important. My role is to use, to transform the existing budget into resilience but not to get new money.