Strategically speaking

Dr. Alan Marcus, born and raised in Boston, made aliya 41 years ago to Ashkelon. For his first eight years in Israel, he was a lecturer in geomorphology (study of land forms, flooding, wave erosion, desert formation) at Tel Aviv University. He left that job to become director of the Ashkelon Regional Association for Environmental Quality. During his five years at the association, he reorganized and expanded the department, to deal with every aspect of environmental quality management, from monitoring the Ashkelon coal-fired electric power station to studying the active erosion of Ashkelon’s coastal cliffs.

For the last 27 years, Marcus has been the director of strategic planning for the Ashkelon Municipality. This was a municipal position that had just been established by the Interior Ministry together with the Joint Distribution Committee in 1988. Marcus’s main goal now was to help city officials make decisions based on facts, information and reason.

Since it was a newly defined position, there were few guidelines and little outside assistance. The demands from the city to solve its myriad problems were endless, leading Marcus to feel as if sometimes he had been thrown into a minefield while being fired at from all sides, with no map to lead him to safety.

As a result, he adapted a groundbreaking tool based on geographic information systems (GIS) that were being used as a mapping and geo-analysis tool by municipal engineering departments all over the world.

Marcus, however, took the tool one step further by applying these analyses to all aspects of city decision-making, including education, social services, public works and emergency planning and preparedness. It is an innovative, unique program best utilized and totally effective for strategic decision support.

Marcus’s system was especially useful when rockets launched by terrorists from Gaza, a mere seven kilometers from Ashkelon’s southern edge, started falling on the city in 2006. Using GIS, he set up a first-of-its-kind emergency response program for the city, which has been and is still studied by city representatives all over Israel and the world.

Within five minutes after any emergency event, whether a missile, earthquake, tsunami or terrorist attack, this program, using digital maps, provides instant information about existing public buildings and dangerous materials within the immediate impact area, as well as critical demographic information as to ages, special needs, health status, disabilities and languages spoken by those in the affected area. This allows the proper emergency response teams to be formed and activated immediately, putting much of the city at ease.

When a missile falls on any Israeli city, IDF Home Front Command protocol allows several city observers to be on the streets together with the police, army, fire and rescue services and medical emergency services. At the same time, city officials and emergency personnel are hunkered down in an underground command center. Immediately after the first responders complete their tasks, they request emergency teams to come to the affected site(s) to join them.

These groups consist of social workers, psychologists, translators (if needed) and infrastructure repair people.

During the past 10 years, there have been several instances when a volley of rockets hit different areas of the city at the same time. Until the implementation of Marcus’s program, Ashkelon was literally and figuratively blind as to the consequences of each attack. Since nearly 800 rockets have fallen on the city in the last 10 years, this program has proven itself to be invaluable. Within five minutes of a rocket striking the city, the geo-analysis of the impact sites is evaluated and specific teams are assigned to each affected location. For the first time anywhere in the world, the city can respond to emergencies by almost immediately getting the right people at the right time to the right place.

The program is one of many tools being used by the Ashkelon Municipality to promote city resilience during times of crisis and bring a sense of safety and security to its residents.

“City resilience” is a fairly new term promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation that describes the ability of a city to not only recover after a disaster but to move forward after the event and not return to the original status quo or even fall back into a situation far worse.

In 2013, on behalf of the Ashkelon Municipality, Marcus applied to the foundation in the hopes of being selected as a participant in its new, prestigious initiative called “100 Resilient Cities Network.” Each of the winning 100 cities would receive $1 million to build a strategic program for fostering city resilience.

Out of the 400 cities worldwide vying for this honor, Ashkelon ranked in the top 33 of the first-round winners, joining the exclusive club of resilient cities that includes New York, San Francisco, Mexico City, Melbourne, Rio de Janeiro and Rome.

Marcus has also won various international awards based on his work in improving city-service performance, accountability and citizen satisfaction – three elements that constitute a new paradigm for “smart” municipal management.

The goal is to reduce the need for residents to complain about city maintenance and services. This is done by sending out neighborhood city inspectors to spot problems and nip them in the bud before they become more serious, causing people to complain. In addition, the city checks its effectiveness in dealing with citizen complaints by follow-up phone satisfaction surveys and meetings with city maintenance workers to examine grievances and prevent further ones of the same type.

The complaints are recorded using GIS, which also maps locations of where the people are who are not satisfied with the city’s response.

Marcus’s award-winning program has helped municipal decision makers reduce the number of public complaints, identify solutions to decrease public dissatisfaction and increase dialogue and feedback between residents and the city.

The Council of Europe and the International Union of Local Authorities have recognized Marcus’s system.

In 2012, the council awarded him first place in the non-European category of Best Practice Award for the Regeneration of Coastal Towns. Later that year, Marcus flew to Guangzhou, China, to receive an urban innovation award at a festive gala attended by mayors from all over the world.

Today, although officially retired as of March 2015, Marcus is in demand to lecture to foreign government professionals who come to Israel to learn about the country’s emergency response program and its city resilience building. He also lectures on strategic management and smart decision support systems using GIS.

During his 41 years in Ashkelon, Marcus has played a big part in making major changes in the successful running of the city, bringing a sense of security and the feeling that the city truly cares and is striving to raise residents’ and visitors’ quality of life. One could also add that he is himself a resilient figure, having contributed so much in so many different areas that have had a positive impact on hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

Former Bostonian Dr. Alan Marcus has developed a groundbreaking system to aid emergency response in times of crisis.