Istanbul Metropolitan
Municipality

ChallengeIstanbul is not just a city. It is a civilization-scale system: 16 million residents, a GDP equivalent to the 21st-largest economy in the world, and among the top five most visited cities on earth. When the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality set out to define how the city would respond to future shocks — from earthquakes to climate stress to social disruption — the scale of the challenge was matched only by its urgency.

The complication: resilience, as a concept, is almost impossible to measure. How do you convince 214 institutions to align behind a shared framework, build a credible evidence base from 800+ scientific publications, and create a governance model that doesn’t collapse under its own bureaucratic weight?

SolutionADBA mobilized a City Resilience Team of approximately 30 experts and built a comprehensive evidence base from 800+ scientific publications, 214 institutions, and 28 global metropolises. A critical piece of the work was making resilience legible to decision-makers — quantifying the global economic impact of inaction at $300 billion to drive cross-institutional buy-in. The Resilience Model was designed to be authentic, functional, and scalable — not ornamental.