Criteria for urban resilience assessment: Building indicators for the CDMX resilience strategy.

Mexico City is one of the world largest megacities, with a metropolitan area of 22 million inhabitants and located in an area exposed to multiple risks including geological and hydrological shocks, as well as political, economic and social stresses. In 2013, the city was selected to be part of 100 Resilient Cities. This initiative brought an opportunity to build capacities for urban resilience and the implementation of actions to improve adaptive capacity, disaster response and infrastructure with a resilience design for the city. Three years later, the Resilience Office published Mexico City Resilience Strategy, aimed to “… guide the government, the private sector, the civil society and the scientific community to respond to the main shocks and stresses in the city through an integrated cross-sectoral, multilevel approach …”. The Strategy identifies key pillars and goals in order to build resilience at the community and city levels; however, after applying the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL, Consejo Nacional de Evaluación de la Política de Desarrollo Social) methodology to assess policy design it has been identified the lack of indicators to evaluate it, in terms of adaptive transformation. The development of urban resilience in Mexico City requires specific criteria to achieve success. This paper looks at different assessment frameworks developed for similar initiatives around the world (ARUP, Global X-Network, Resilience Alliance). Additionally analyses different assessment methods and frameworks and discusses insights from experts, researchers, consultants and government officials by carrying out a workshop, and identifying key elements as redundancy, resourcefulness, diversity and robustness to build adaptive capacity for resilience at the urban system level. Note the this paper identifies key criteria, and transformation indicators to assess the Strategy´s pillars. Finally, it recommends a road map to create a monitoring and evaluation system.