Resilience of Smart City

Building cities that are resilient to become crucial as more unpredictable hazards and disasters that we have never seen before. A city should be able to deal with and adapt to various kinds of pressure, changes and disaster without harming the livelihood or severely damaging the urban system. Urban resilience is a relatively new concept in the development of cities in China, while on the other hand smart city concept has gained popularity. Zhu et al. (2019) studied the relationship between resilience and smartness and assessed the resilience of 187 smart cities in China. 

The result showed that there is a positive correlation between smartness and five dimensions of resilience. Smartness strongly correlates with infrastructure, economic and institutional resilience, moderately correlates with social resilience and weak with environmental resilience. Larger cities with more advanced technology and sufficient human resources are shown to be more resilient, while smart cities that are still underdeveloped physically and economically showed low levels of resilience. 

The study then suggested improving smart cities resilience by enhancing the collaboration of multiple stakeholders, as political and social participation contributes to the adaptability, response, and recovery of external shock in cities. In addition, there is room for improvement to direct smart cities technology into the environmental resiliency sector. There is great potential in using ICT to promote better planning, management, and response to environmental disaster.

Reference:

Zhu, S., Li, D., & Feng, H. (2019). Is smart city resilient? Evidence from China. Sustainable Cities and Society, 50, 101636.

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