After a morning of high-level discussion at the City Dialogues Vienna, participants broke into three focused tracks to forge actionable solutions for the future of our cities. Moving beyond broad definitions, these sessions confronted the fundamental dilemmas at the heart of building resilient communities. Moderated by leading academics Professor Winston Chow, Mr Johannes Lutter, and Professor Orlando Woods, the tracks explored the complex interplay between finance, social equity, and technology. The summaries from these deep dives revealed a remarkable consensus on the need for human-centric, context-aware, and process-driven solutions.

Track 1: Financing Urban Resilience - A New Value Equation

The track on financing, summarised by Professor Winston Chow, established a new framework for valuing and justifying investment in resilience, moving decisively beyond traditional economic models. The discussion, described as "very, very fun" and organic, was an exchange among academics, practitioners, and mayors that tackled the complexities of funding projects whose returns are not easily quantifiable.

Redefining Value Beyond ROI

The group’s first conclusion was a fundamental reframing of the mission itself. The purpose of resilience financing, they argued, is more than just that; its primary role is to protect lives, protect ecosystems, and ensure long-term stability. This immediately shifts the focus from a purely economic calculation to a socio-economic one. While private investors understandably seek operational benefits, the discussion stressed that we must ‘develop mechanisms to capture and reinvest the value generated by resilient infrastructure’, a value that includes not just market returns but also non-market social and economic benefits. This led to the track’s central dilemma, which challenges the very foundation of traditional project appraisal: Do we need a benefit-cost ratio to justify investing in resilience, or can we recognise its intrinsic value? The question implies that the cost of inaction - measured in lives and well-being - may be too great to be confined to a spreadsheet.

The Primacy of Trust and Governance

The discussion identified the intangible elements that ultimately determine an investment's success. The group stressed that trust and governance are the backbones of resilience. Trust was described as expensive, scarce, and fragile, but regarded as essential for building collaboration between governments, communities, and private actors. This foundational trust, in turn, depends on institutional capacity, political continuity and transparent discourse.

While Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) are often proposed as a key solution, the track warned that PPP’s are not a simple fix. They require competent, stable governments, extensive due diligence, [and a] clear alignment of interests. Without this foundational elements, as one participant starkly warned, PPPs can become “pain, pain, pain”. The political dimension was deemed critical, with one table strongly emphasising that politics matter. Who is in power, how long they serve, and whether they are committed to long-term visions over short-term gains are all crucial factors that can make or break a resilience project.

The Imperative of Local Context

Finally, the group underscored that financing models cannot be one-size-fits-all. A core conclusion was that resilience has to be rooted in local realities. The summary noted that global models are difficult to replicate due to cultural, political differences, and that even within countries, regional disparities persist. This finding serves as a crucial check on the tendency to import solutions from one context to another. The discussion also highlighted the spatial inequalities within countries, noting the critical need to fund smaller towns and rural regions, where resources are often concentrated in capital cities. This point was sharpened by the observation that the outdated ‘global north-versus global south’ divide no longer reflects developmental complexities, demanding a more nuanced, localised approach to investment.

Track 2: Social Equity & Sustainability - A People-First Mandate

This track, summarised by a team led by Johannes Lutter, outlined a mandate for putting people, especially the most vulnerable, at the centre of resilience planning. The discussions revealed that social resilience is an active, ongoing practice, not a static outcome.

A Mandate for Targeted Action and Critical Thinking

The discussion began with the pragmatic need for targeted action. Given that resources are always limited, the first step must be to identify which groups in a society are most at risk and design interventions specifically for them. However, the group also wrestled with the unique nature of resilience, asking, ‘how can we prepare for what we don't know in advance?’ This led to a discussion on the different types of crises cities face - both the slow ones and the fast ones - and the potential for conflicts of aims between the immediate goals of resilience and the long-term goals of sustainability. To be truly effective, the track concluded that a city must apply a gendered and intersectional perspective in anything you do, because that's part of social resilience.

Resilience by Design: A Focus on Process and Agency

A powerful concept that emerged was ‘Resilience by Design,’ which was defined not by the physical design of buildings or places but by the thoughtful design of fair and inclusive processes. This involves advocacy, planning, and bringing communities in. The ultimate goal of this approach is to return agency to communities. This does not mean governments simply passing off responsibility; rather, it means creating a structured dialogue between organised communities and the public authorities, empowering them as genuine partners in shaping their own futures. This requires constant interaction and co-production between the city administration and the community.

This people-first approach also redefines what is considered critical to a city's function. In a memorable example, it was noted that during the pandemic, Vienna’s kindergartens were kept open because they were understood to be social infrastructures as critical infrastructures, as important as water, sewage, or the supermarket. This highlights a perspective where the architecture of care is as vital as the architecture of concrete, and where the starting point for resilience planning is the everyday life perspective of what people need to live a happy life.

Track 3: Innovation & Technology - A Call for Critical Thinking

The technology track, summarised by Professor Orlando Woods, spent more time discussing what technology cannot do than what it can. The result was a refreshingly skeptical and nuanced perspective on the role of digital solutions in urban resilience.

Acknowledging Technology's Severe Limits

The main finding was a critical awareness of technology's limits. The group concluded that its role is negligible in solving deep, fundamental urban problems like falling birth rates, economic inequality, or the mental health crisis, which in some ways is driven by a digitally dependent society. Participants warned of Infrastructural Deception, where a quick, cheap, and seductively packaged tech fix can mask deeper, more difficult infrastructural or political problems that require real will to solve. For example, it is far easier to introduce an app that tells you when your bus will arrive than it is to undertake the costly and politically difficult task of widening roads to alleviate congestion.

From Smart to Smart Enough

As a result, the group advocated for a shift away from the ‘smart city’ buzzword, which often promises unrealistic outcomes, and toward a smart enough city - a model that is relative to context, the specific problem we're trying to solve, and the material infrastructure we have. This concept moderates the hype and pushes for more practical, context-appropriate solutions.

This requires a new way of thinking about data and success. The discussion highlighted the inherent biases in data and the path dependency it creates, where an over-reliance on metrics can close off other, less quantifiable solutions. The track concluded with a call for societally-driven Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that reflect intangible values like well-being and social cohesion, moving beyond what can be easily captured by technology. To ensure ethical use of data, three best practices were identified: open access, ensuring consent, and the localisation of data.

Summary

While each track explored a different domain, their conclusions converged on three powerful, cross-cutting themes that together form a new vision for urban resilience.

• The Primacy of People: Every track, regardless of its focus, concluded that resilience efforts must be fundamentally human-centric. From the financing group’s emphasis on protecting lives to the social equity track’s mandate to target the vulnerable and the technology group's call for societally-driven KPIs, the dialogue consistently placed human well-being at the center of the equation.
• The Power of Process: Successful resilience is less about a final product and more about creating fair, inclusive, and trust-based processes. The financing track’s focus on trust and governance directly supports the social equity track’s core idea of "Resilience by Design"- a methodology rooted in fair processes and structured community dialogue. This shows that the architecture of collaboration is as important as the architecture of the city itself.
• The Importance of Context: There is no one-size-fits-all solution. The conclusion from the financing track that global models are difficult to replicate and resilience must be local was strongly mirrored by the technology track’s call for a smart enough city. This shared insight emphasises that the most effective solutions are not imported, but are designed for and by the specific communities they serve.