Unexpected crises and risks affect the urban population. Critical infrastructure dependency, climate change and social dynamics have captured the attention of city decision makers across different disciplines, sectors, and scales. Addressing these challenges mandates an increase in resilience. This article presents the development of the novel European Resilience Management Guideline (ERMG) developed by the European H2020 Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project. It encompasses five supporting tools for city resilience. The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it describes the extensive co-creation methods used to establish, validate and test the five ERMG tools as collaborations among seven city stakeholders and researchers in Europe. Second, it explains concisely the features of each tool and its use cases and applicability in the city resilience building process. Third, it shows how EMRG supports strategic management in encouraging the visibility of risk dependencies, identifying vicious loops and potential cascading effects, and promoting collaboration between stakeholders to share resources. The article concludes with a discussion of SMR standardization activities to support the transfer of this research results to wider audiences. It covers guidance on local resilience planning and supporting efforts in building and operationalization resilience at the city level. Addressing questions on how the impact of events can be managed requires a multidisciplinary approach across city sectors. For example, cities are highly dependent on CI services, and disruptions that occur in these CIs might have a profound effect on the city's ability to sustain normal functions, affecting the community at large. Not only is there a need to establish a holistic risk-assessment framework across the infrastructures to support cross-sector priorities, but these effects must also be seen in a wider city context. For example, how do organizations manage their infrastructure and variations in risk perception between stakeholders (Brown et al., 2017)? How will critical city services

A priority must be made on making cities more resilient against crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic to help plan for an uncertain future. However, due to the insufficient transfer of knowledge from, among others, research projects to cities, they are often unaware of the resilience tools available as well as possible standardization activities to foster the integration of relevant stakeholders. To address this issue, this paper analyzes the use of standards and the contribution to standardization in a multi-case study of nine European Framework Program projects and with the Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project, a more in-depth case study. SMR integrated several European cities in its co-creative approach for developing city resilience tools and the related standards series CWA 17300 on ‘City Resilience Development’. Furthermore, the paper defines five steps for integrating standardization in research projects with a focus on (city) resilience and shows the benefits of the standardization process for fostering the engagement of relevant stakeholders.

Risks related to climate change and natural hazards increasingly affect urban areas such as historic towns, old urban quarters, villages, and hamlets. These, as well as historic landscapes, make up a significant part of an urban area’s identity and cannot just be rebuilt or significantly changed without taking into account the historic value, cultural background, and prescribed regulations. Systematic resilience building for historic areas is becoming essential, and research supporting it will be in the spotlight. However, questions still exist concerning how to best transfer research results into practice at the community level. Standardization of resilience-enhancing methods and tools deriving from research projects is one option, chosen, e.g., for the EU-Horizon 2020 project ARCH. Within the project, a disaster risk management (DRM) framework has been composed and then transferred into a standard, supported by a co-creation approach involving relevant stakeholders. This article outlines the project’s different standardization steps and its impact on the development of the ARCH DRM Framework. It highlights the systematic inclusion of project-external stakeholders who actively contribute to the validation and enhancement of the ARCH DRM framework to guarantee maximum applicability in historic areas, supporting them in their fight against the impacts of climate change and natural hazards.

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