RE.invest - A Roadmap for Resilience
This report summarizes the outcomes of RE.invest, an 18-month predevelopment process with eight U.S. cities and teams of leading private sector design, engineering, law, and finance experts. The RE.invest Initiative focuses on infrastructure predevelopment - all of the activities that go into designing and planning large-scale infrastructure projects prior to construction. The framework is used to reimagine civic infrastructure systems to create both public value and private investment opportunities, especially for vulnerable communities. The report provides an overview of the landscape for infrastructure investment in the U.S., and offers a compelling case for redesigning the predevelopment process to focus on resilience. This national effort was launched with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation.
RE.invest was developed to help cities move beyond stating needs to identifying investable public-interest projects through a rapid, structured design and delivery process. A Roadmap for Resilience makes the case for taking an integrated design and financing approach to resilience planning and reimagining the predevelopment process from a systems perspective - to create a template that can be applied to any city to first generate, then refine, and finally finance innovative resilience solutions.
The document is organized in five main sections. The first lays out the key challenges in urban infrastructure investment and makes the case for investing in resilience. The second presents a new guide for predevelopment using principles of design thinking and systems innovation to address the barriers to resilient infrastructure investment. The third section captures the RE.invest process and the fourth provides a thorough overview of all eight RE.invest partner city solutions. The final section provides recommendations for government officials, developers, financiers, and communities engaged in investing in resilience and reinvesting in communities.
This report is written for the wide audience of stakeholders involved in urban resilience. In particular:
The Systems Approach section is organized to help governments and philanthropies encourage predevelopment and close the gap between conceptual design and procurement of infrastructure.
The Partner City Solutions section is intended to inspire designers, project developers, and investors to integrate infrastructure planning across sectors and identify new investment opportunities.
The Guide for Infrastructure Innovation aims to provide these institutions and community-based organizations with new points of entry for enhancing traditional planning and procurement processes in their cities to build greater resilience.
The report describes the objectives, partnerships, building blocks, and key activities of the RE.invest team in crafting a resilience-focused approach to predevelopment and developing specific projects in all eight RE.invest partner cities. The partner cities include:
El Paso, Texas
Honolulu, Hawaii
Hoboken, New Jersey
Miami Beach, Florida
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Norfolk, Virginia
New Orleans, Louisiana
San Francisco, California
For an overarching view of the challenges and opportunities of resilient infrastructure planning, this report offers a high-level description of the RE.invest process and the resulting city-specific solutions. For more detail, each city solution is expanded in a set of individual city reports (see www.reinvestinitiative.org)
RE.invest was a collaborative initiative with partners Bechtel Corporation, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and Wall Street Without Walls, along with many informal collaborators and contributors who provided technical guidance, design feedback, and local inspiration in various cities.
Publication Date: March 25, 2015
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