The Smart Mature Resilience project responds to the need for enhanced resilience in European cities.
SMR defines city resilience as:
“the ability of a city or region to resist, absorb, adapt to and recover from acute shocks and chronic stresses to keep critical services functioning, and to monitor and learn from on-going processes through city and cross-regional collaboration, to increase adaptive abilities and strengthen preparedness by anticipating and appropriately responding to future challenges” (Bång, Rankin 2016).
The Smart Mature Resilience project has developed five tools:
Resilience Maturity Model
The Resilience Maturity Model (RMM) helps cities to assess their resilience status and identify the ideal path for the evolution of the resilience building process through a series of stages. The RMM aims to provide an optimum path to increase the resilience level of cities. The RMM enables assessment of a city's current resilience status and the identification of areas for improvement. Following this initial assessment, a city uses the RMM to guide the definition of the strategy to increase their resilience level, based on the policies included in it. The RMM also provides a holistic overview of the resilience building process and helps end-users to understand resilience as a multidimensional objective.
Risk Systemicity Questionnaire
The Risk Systemicity Questionnaire (RSQ) has been designed as an interactive set of questions, which city stakeholders typically complete in a group. The main purpose of the tool is to encourage focused, interdisciplinary conversations about those risks that are of greatest concern to the city. It focuses on ten risk areas:
These networks of risks are presented as risk scenarios, some of which result in vicious cycles. Users progress through the tool by completing questions, which ask them to consider whether defined risks scenarios are likely or not to occur in their cities. Upon completion of the RSQ, the user is presented with a prioritization, which may then be used as a focus for developing mitigation strategies.
Resilience Information Portal
The Resilience Information Portal (RP) serves as a toolbox that can complement and enhance the platforms and software that cities already have in place. It allows cities to display data internally or publicly that is already available to the city as it applies to resilience, vulnerability and crisis situations.
City Resilience Dynamics Model
The City Resilience Dynamics Tool (CRD) aims to help city disaster managers diagnose, explore and learn about the resilience building process. They can use the tool to make decisions and be able to take the correct actions in the resilience building process. The model allows the user to try different policy options, identifying the implications of each of them in the resilience improvement process.
Resilience Building Policies
The Resilience Building Policies (RBP) tool combines custom ways to view policies contained in the RMM with detailed information and examples from case studies detailing policy implementation in partner cities, references of sources to case studies from other cities around the world, and links to risk mitigation actions that support the policies.
The tool provides a comprehensive reference centre for strategic managers in cities and municipal workers tasked with implementing resilience building policies; provides a practical point of reference for cities considering the implementation of related policies; provides illustrative detail for the policies in the RMM and the CRD and can be navigated conveniently via a dedicated webpage that also includes a wiki format and invites cities to upload their own case studies.
The European Resilience Management Guideline
- Provides guidance to cities and local governments in assessing their local resilience status;
- Sets measurable targets together with local stakeholders, using the five tools to help the city further build local resilience and progress within the maturity stages;
- Defines an operational framework that supports municipalities and relevant stakeholders in implementing an integrated management system that enhances city resilience and helps cities enhance their resilience maturity status
Five Steps to Operationalise City Resilience
- Baseline review
- Risk awareness
- Resilience strategy
- Implementation and monitoring
- Evaluation and reporting
Two crosscutting elements are required and need to be kept into mind, and perform relevant activities, throughout the steps of the cycle, and these are:
- A comprehensive and targeted organizational setup
- The continuous communication and engagement with stakeholders, including the general public
The Cities
With the support of ICLEI, the tools are piloted in a group of three core cities (Glasgow, San Sebastian and Kristiansand) and reviewed and evaluated by researchers and Tier 2 cities (Rome, Bristol, Vejle and Riga) in an improvement cycle. A third group of ‘engaged’ cities receives training in the use of the finalized tools, and the tools are disseminated to ‘Tier 4’ cities.
Tier 1: Three pilot CITIES
Glasgow, Kristiansand and Donostia / San Sebastián
Tier 2: Peer-reviewer CITIES
Bristol, Rome, Riga and Vejle
Tier 3: Engaged CITIES
Amman, Athens, Thessaloniki, Stirling, Malmö, Greater Manchester, Malaga and Münster
Tier 4: Informed CITIES
Alba, Barcelona Provincial Council, Municipality of Bratislava-Karlova, Cagliari, Region of Emilia
Romagna, Guimaraes, Larissa, London, Pavlos Melas Municipality, Prague, Potenza, Udine (on
behalf of the Union of Inter-Municipal Territory of Central Friuli), Warsaw
Standardisation
Project results are prepared for exploitation through standardization processes initiated by German standardization body DIN (German Institute for Standardization). The following three standardisation activities have been initiated:
• City Resilience Development – Maturity Model
• City Resilience Development – Operational Guidance
• City Resilience Development – Information Portal