Making Less Vulnerable Cities: Resilience as a New Paradigm of Smart Planning

Abstract

Previous studies have investigated how resilience can play a pivotal role in strategic urban design in the Netherlands and in some regional and municipal planning laws in Italy. Here, we have analysed several European projects that utilised the resilience approach successfully. Dutch policies already include resilience and climate adaptation in urban strategies. Moreover, they share those strategies with urban communities, making the innovation of the city real and cutting-edge. In Italy, on the other hand, the concept of resilience is present only in some regional laws and is still not used as an urban tool. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate how resilience can become the new paradigm of smart planning. Furthermore, we demonstrate how resilience is fundamental at all levels of urban intervention, involving municipal authorities, architects and urban planners, firms and enterprises, citizens and communities. The urban governance must establish specific goals and objectives to create a smart and sustainable city. Resilience should be one of these main aims, in order to achieve an innovative city design. A climate strategy should also be part of urban smart planning, enabling the implementation of a safer and resilient city.

Modern Conceptions of Cities as Smart and Sustainable and Their Commonalities

“…As concerns the smart city, this second conception considers the role of new technologies but focuses on citizens' roles as passive actors and active co-creators because they can contribute to the city's governance [75]. Moreover, elements related to sustainability emerge but are intended mainly to maintain, for the long term, the results obtained through the smartization process [47,79,98]. Finally, with respect to the sustainable city, as in the previous cases, many elements characterizing the first two conceptions described are recalled but are done so using a new approach and through the filter of a new philosophy: an equitable and balanced setting of goals in line with the principles of sustainable development [52,99,100].…”

The contribution of the scientific research for a less vulnerable and more resilient community: the Val d’Agri (Southern Italy) case

“…The growth of the environmental awareness, the involvement of the citizens and a broaden participation of the community represent the direction toward which to aim to build a less vulnerable and more resilient community. Engaging local communities in the territorial governance model is vital in building a society that can sustain resilience consistently (Moraci et al 2018). The goal of both sustainable and resilient development of a complex territory, like that of Val d'Agri, requires the implementation of an innovative territorial governance model, in which the role of scientific research is essential and strategic.…”

“…The seven principles are: (1) maintain diversity and redundancy, (2) manage connectivity, (3) manage slow variables and feedbacks, (4) foster complex adaptive systems thinking, (5) encourage learning, (6) broaden participation and (7) promote polycentric governance systems. Resilience can play a pivotal role in strategic planning, integrating resilience-based territorial governance and strategic environmental planning in urban development and social aspects (Moraci et al 2018). To this aim, it is important to define policies and codes in order to integrate resilience-based land use and emergency planning in urban development and social aspects.…”

VisualUVAM: A Decision Support System Addressing the Curse of Dimensionality for the Multi-Scale Assessment of Urban Vulnerability in Spain

“…Urban vulnerability (UV) in general, and its adaptive component in particular, have become key issues for a sustainable urban development [1][2][3][4] which have lead, in recent decades, to the improvement of the existing urban vulnerability assessment models (UVAMs). In the pursuit of this, several requirements have been pointed out, all of which should be simultaneously addressed by vulnerability assessment methods in order to integrate vulnerability assessment into current urban strategic planning (USP) [2,5] and fill the gap between assessment and actions [6]. Specifically, the advancement in multi-scale assessment methods is needed to afford a multi-scale assessment framework providing an integrated evaluation of entities at the three relevant levels of government (Central government, regions, and cities), with which to avoid resources allocation problems [7,8].…”