From heatwaves to flash floods, cities are becoming the frontline of climate change. Yet amid the rising risks, a new generation of innovators is re-engineering the urban landscape, not just to survive but to thrive.
At VivaTech 2025, three leading voices explored urban resiliency. Edward Bouygues, Deputy CEO of the Bouygues Group, shared how builders are turning infrastructure into a driver of adaptation. Andrea Fernandez, Managing Director at C40 Cities, showed how global networks are empowering municipalities to face climate extremes. And Sascha Stop, Director of Innovation for the City of Amsterdam, revealed why trust is the foundation of resilience.
Rethinking the Foundations
For Amsterdam’s Sascha Stop, resilience isn’t built on technology, it’s built on relationships.
It is not that innovation never happens alone,” she said. “It takes five essential roles and one invisible, powerful force that connects them all.
Those five roles, she explained, represent the ecosystem every city needs to turn ideas into impact. The initiator sparks change by daring to act. The inventor imagines new possibilities. The builder tests and implements them. The legitimizer gives credibility and protection. Yet even with these four in place, nothing moves without the fifth, the mediator, the one who bridges gaps and builds understanding.
And the invisible force that connects them all? Trust.
If we talk about creating resilient cities, we must talk about trust. It’s the real currency. It can’t be bought, it can’t be downloaded, and it can’t be forced.
A World of Uneven Risks
For Andrea Fernandez, Managing Director at C40 Cities, resilience is not just an engineering challenge, it’s a question of equity.
By 2050, 1.6 billion people will face extreme heat,” she noted. “The difference is how ready their cities will be.
She noted that C40’s analysis found the impact of climate change in Global South cities could be ten times greater than in the Global North. Informal housing, fragile infrastructure, and scarce funding turn every flood or drought into a crisis. Yet Fernandez pointed to powerful models emerging from these very contexts.
In Freetown, Sierra Leone, the city is planting a million trees, paying residents to care for them and tying their work to carbon credits.
It’s a self-sustaining loop of adaptation,” she said, “where community becomes both the workforce and the beneficiary.
Building Systems, Not Showcases
From the builder’s side, Edward Bouygues, Deputy CEO of the Bouygues Group, offered a dose of realism. Innovation, he argued, isn’t what’s missing, it’s the ability to deploy it. Too many solutions already exist but stall in layers of authorization, regulation, and funding.
Bouygues described how his group, active in construction, road works, real estate, telecoms, energy, and services, is experimenting with practical tools for resilience: thermal energy networks that reduce carbon emissions, road materials that recycle on site, and systems that capture and reuse rainwater rather than letting it run off.
The task ahead, he said, is scaling what works. Cities need to move faster, coordinate better, and think in systems rather than in showcases.
You need many solutions, implemented step by step,” he reminded the audience. “That’s how we make cities livable again.
The Amsterdam Method
For Stop, resilience begins with changing the rules of the system itself, starting with how cities buy innovation.
In local “living labs,” the City of Amsterdam tested blue-green roofs, systems that store and evaporate rainwater, reducing rooftop temperatures by as much as 40°C. Instead of prescribing materials, Stop’s team rewrote the rules of sourcing:
We don’t buy green roofs anymore,” she said. “We buy roofs that stay forty degrees cooler.
It’s a small change with big implications. By defining outcomes rather than specifications, Amsterdam opened the door to diverse innovators and turned bureaucracy into a driver of creativity.
The Next Generation’s Blueprint
If resilience begins with trust, it must also be shared across generations. Stop ended the session with a message to young innovators:
You are never too young to lead,” she said. “Bring the creativity my generation is missing, and we’ll help you navigate the system.
Her words captured the spirit of the discussion. Resilience isn’t about futuristic cities, but about people who choose to build differently. The cities of tomorrow won’t rise from steel, sensors, or software alone, but from collaboration and courage, the true materials of the urban future.
Want to learn more about smart cities? Check out this article: City Management and AI: How the Everyday Is Changing
