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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research article by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original article, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole article.

So, this research episode is working with a 2019 article about an investigation whether the smart city is resilient based on Chinese evidence. Smart city is often identified with many different aspects as well, such as sustainability, and I though it to be interesting to examine whether smart city should be resilient as well This article gives an insight into the smart cities’ resiliency through case studies of Chinese cities.

Our summary today works with the article titled Is smart city resilient? Evidence from China from 2019 by Shiyao Zhu, Dezhi Li, and Haibo Feng. The article was published in the Sustainabile Cities and Societies journal to discuss differences and similarities between the smart and resilient city concepts.

Zhu, Li and Feng started the article with their assessment on the city, being exposed to various problems or distasters like food, water or energy shortage, and these could all affect the populations living in urban areas. Smart city seems to be made to deal with such urban problems with ICT and other modern technologies. And although the technology seems to be a crucial part of the smart city, the smartness of the city increasingly concerns people, policy and governance, and sustainability.

However, resilience was rarely mentioned in these smart city concepts. The concept of resilience is that a city should have the ability to absorb, adapt and transform external pressures and guarantee urban safety during any crisis, hazards, or disasters. Can and should smart city incorporate such a task? Only a few studies tried to investigate the relationship between smartness and urban resilience. Both initiatives are fragmented, and they are separated from each other. The article aims to check the correlation between urban smartness and urban resilience based on Chinese city constructions. The objectives were to identify the indicators for urban resilience evaluation, to assess the resilient level of smart cities in China by multi-criteria decision-making method, to discover the relationship between the resilience and smartness of a city, and to give suggestions for improving the smartness as well as the resilience level of cities.

Until the writing of the article, 290 pilot smart city programs had been endorsed by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development in China since 2013. The main purpose of smart city development seemed to be lying in the perception, interconnection, application and innovation towards different directions, such as transportation, energy, medicine and so on, without green space, environmental protection and efficient urban infrastructure. The yearly Chinese governmental assessment on smart cities revealed the smartness level of pilot Chinese smart cities from the perspective of smart infrastructure, smart governance, smart people, smart economy and security system with 17 ICT based indicators. Zhu, Li and Feng adopted the smartness from this assessment report.

Since Chinese areas are prone to many types of natural disasters, mitigating risks and strengthening disaster resilience have gained more attention in China than ever. More and more cities highlight resilience in their plans and strategies, despite the fact that urban resilience seems to be relatively unfamiliar. Additionally, it is still separated from the national smart city strategy. The urban resilience guides are rather city or district wide than nation wide globally. Finally, the fundamental capacity to identify change, achieve local consensus, and implement an adaptive strategy in an open system which is capable of informing and contesting technocratic perspectives is lagging.

Their aim was to create an indicator-based measurement for comparative assessment of urban resilience for Chinese smart cities. First, they selected a sounding conceptual framework to establish indicators, then, these indicators were tested against the context of China. Then the multi-criteria decision-making method was adopted to weight the indicators and rank them, and finally the relationship between smartness and resilence was tested.

The five dimensions of urban resilience assessment considered were infrastructural, economic, social, institutional, and environmental resilience based on the investigation of existing resilience measuring frameworks. Infrastructural resilience meant the conditions of the physical assets potentially influencing the recovery and resistance capacity, such as hospitals, schools, etc. Economic resilience referred to the ability to prevent economic up and downs in the face of changes in external and internal environments, such as employment rate. Social resilience stand for the ability of social entities and mechanisms to effectively predict, mitigate and respond to disasters and minimise the social disruption, such as aged population. Institutional resilience was the situation of organisational, management and social security in order to adapt to any changes like the health coverage security. Environmental resilience was the capacity of urban environmental systems to respond to disturbances and recover quickly, such as urban green spaces.

To compare smartness with resilience, the indicators in the five resilient dimensions were chosen without ICT basis. Then each proposed indicator was ranked by 8 urban resilient experts. The indicators with more than average value were selected as effective indicators, and through normalisation, they were converted into similar measurement scales. The multi-criateria decision-making technique was created through several steps and then the relationship between smartness and resilience was investigated by Pearson’s correlation analysis.

For the examination, they chose 187 cities from the Chinese smart city projects, while 21 indicators were chosen for the five resiliency dimensions. Based on the investigation, five classification for disaster resilience were established: lowest, low, moderate, high and highest. The examined 187 cities belonged to four categories: 0.53% in lowest resilience, 84.49% in low resilience, 12.83% in moderate resilience, 2.13% in high resilience and none of the cities reached the highest resilience. They highlighted that this data proved the resilience of Chinese smart cities being relatively low. Additionally, they also mentioned that the different cities had different grades in the five resiliency dimensions indicating that each smart city has its unique characteristics, plans and strategies to fulfill the resilience with its own background.

Their analysis proved that there was a positive correlation between the examined variables. The correlation between smartness and total resilience, infrastructural resilience, economic resilience and institutational resilience were strong. Between smartness and social resilience, the correlation was moderate, while between smartness and environmental resilience was weak. Additionally, they also established that total resilience was significantly correlated with urban smartness, while with the five dimension, it was somewhat different. Based on their results, total resilience, infrastructural resilience, economic resilience, and institutional resilience can be explained reasonably well with urban smartness, while social and environmental resilience may require more than pure smartness. The correlation between smartness and resilience showed also big differences among cities depending on location, situation, resources, economic conditions. Very few cities presented high resilience but low smartness, but several cities showed high smartness with low resilience.

Their suggestions to implement policies for urban smartness and resilience development included cities to have their own plans and suggestions to improve resilience and smartness based on their own background and characteristics. Additionally, strengthening infrastructure and economy with ICT and other modern technologies seemed to be important for urban resilience promotion. The planning and implementation of smart and resilient strategies are needed to be at all levels of development involving every actor in the process. They nominated the government as the leader in dealing with disasters, while the collaborations between multiple stakeholders are highly needed during the promotion of smart and resilient city. As smartness has significant impact on urban resilience, the development of urban resilient strategies also need to consider smartness. And finally, more focus on environmental resilience is much needed.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects: 1. The five established resiliency dimensions for cities to focus: economic, environmental, infrastructural, institutional, and social resilience. 2. The connection between smartness and resilience and the significance of this connection: smart city is not just the technologically city, and a city without resilience is less ‘smart’. 3. The need for each urban area set their own goals based on their unique situation and involving all stakeholders: this is the best way to create the best outcomes.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions: 1. How is resilience and sustainability connected? Of course, that is a completely different investigation, but that would be great to know, especially since some have already suggested to focus on resilience instead of sustainability, because that ship had sailed already, we will need to talk about resilience instead. 2. What is the difference between smart city with urban resilience and resilient city with smartness? And Is there a difference in the outcome?

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting research for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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