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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 paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the book chapter titled Smart cities and disaster resilience from 2017 by Neha Bansal, Mahua Mukherjee and Ajay Gairola in the book titled From poverty, inequality to smart city, published by Springer. Since we are investigating the future of cities, and cities are said to bare more and more natural disasters, I thought it would interesting to see how disaster resilience can be enhanced by the smart city concept. This article investigates how efficient urban planning can have a major impact on preparedness and capacities to recover after natural disasters.

The article starts with the general statement about present cities characterised by low-density urban sprawl, fragile infrastructure, low resilience areas and people’s poor coping capability to disasters. The increasing number of natural disasters with the unplanned rapid urban growth have also increasing impacts. People in cities are getting more vulnerable and exposed to disasters, like floods or droughts, which cause death, injury, economic losses and environmental and infrastructural degradation. Since a city is the combination of complex urban systems, like transport, water supply, sanitation, housing and other urban infrastructure and services, strengthening these systems will increase the resilience and help in disaster management.

As urbanisation seems irreversible, its potentials and adaptability for sustainable development must be utilised. The growing number of urban people cause great ecological, economical and social risks and global risks like climate change, despite the cities’ great advantages. Planned and smart urbanisation strategies can reduce energy use, strengthen infrastructure reduce urban sprawl and adverse environmental effects.

Smart cities, smart development and smart growth are a new concept and they emerged due to the need for sustainable development in light of disadvantages of rapid urbanisation, increasing disasters and climate change. Thus integrating disaster preparedness and recovery approaches with eight key principles of smart growth can dynamically change the disaster management of cities. These eight key features of a smart city are: smart economy, smart buildings, smart mobility, smart energy, smart ICT, smart planning, smart citizen, and smart governance. These can play an efficient role as tools for disaster management: firstly in the prevention stage with reducing urban sprawl, thus reducing exposure to disasters, then during the disasater improving adaptation and resilience with strengthened infrastructure, and post-disaster management by improving the efficiency in communication allowing better emergency management and mitigating immediate effects.

Urban resilience can be increased by using high-density compact developments adopted from smart planning during the prevention phase. This specifically directs land use and optimises transportation systems: the more compact land use saves about a third in capital and oprating costs for roads, transit services, water and wastewater, emergency response, recreation services and schools. Compact development reduces urban sprawl which reduces the population’s exposure and vulnerability to natural disasters – directing developments away from disaster-prone areas. This improves overall quality of life and access to resoures, services and amenities by reducing distances.

Urban resilience can be also achieved by chosing the new infrastructure properly and by making it resilient enough not to collapse during or after disasters. Smart city can be understood as an improvement in today’s city both functionally and structurally, using ICT as an infrastructure. With ICT, the different infrastructures can communicate, and the city can work as a giant independent intelligence unit highly informed and adaptive to unexpected situations. Additionally, strengthening existing infrastructure serves a dual purpose: catering the new development requirements with reduction in costs and energy usage, and creating greater resilience.

While urban transportation has been a leading driver behind globalisation, it is also responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions, which increases climate change and its increasingly disastrous effects. Urban developments could be more efficient in creating more compact areas reducing the CO2 emission, which could also be supported by smart means of travels, such as electric and autonomous vehicles. Moreover, better public transportation system could also shift people from personal cars, thus reducing emissions and decreasing urban traffic chaos. Smart growth transportation strategies are more efficient and reduce congestion by providing multiple routes and multiple types of transportation. Smart networked transportation can be used for early warning, emergency management and post-disaster evacuation routes as well.

During the disasters, smart cities can improve the emergency by responding faster and being more advanced. The compact planning and mixed land-use optimise and reduce emergency service’s response time. Additionally, the intelligent transport management systems can provide the ability to communicate and coordinate operations and resources in real time.

Post-disaster situations allow cities to smart growth through different models and approaches. Chinese model includes infrastructure plans for better connections, technological enhancements, and improvement of quality of life, among others. The European model, based on the Giffinger at al research discussed in our first Research episode, provides an integrative approach to profile and benchmark European medium-sized cities and is regarded as an instrument for effective learning processes regarding urban innovations in specific field of urban development.

To enhance urban resilience, a city can also start to establish local renewable energy production, thus in case a disaster happens and the national grid is damaged, they have power generated locally. Plus, resilience can be understood as the community’s ability to adapt to changing conditions or to recover from an emergency event or disaster. Local governments can enhance community resilience, for example, through helping local energy gerenation with solar panels. Renewable sources could mean solar, wind, geothermal and even nuclear power and the establishment of energy storage is also important. Additionally, smart grids can be established, a digitally enabled electrical grid that gathers, distributes and acts on informationa bout the behaviour of all participants in order to improve efficiency, importance, reliability, economics and sustainability of electricity services.

Smart city can even help in the communication for early warning and preparedness with enhanced analytical capabilities and synchronised information flow between the different sectors. City governments can reach their citizens and send them crucial information at a really short notice with the most basic technology of mobile networks.

These ideas and efforts need to be incorporated in the future in our living systems. This needs planning and implementation of smart strategies at all the levels of development, involving each and every actor and stakeholder in the process. Such strategies are already present at some places in governmental levels and some are outside of the public realm.

Smart cities use ICT to involve people, improve city services and enhance urban systems that result in an imporved integrated urban system which altogether improves disaster management intelligently. To make cities disaster resilient right at the inception stage, the efficiency in urban planning is needed to impact communities’ preparedness and capacities to recover from natural disasters. Other aspects of smart growth that focus on more efficient land-use patterns that reduce the spatial extent of the city through high-density compact developments are also needed. The smart growth startegies like creating flexible land-use policies, targeting public investment to catalyse private investment and engaging the entire community in making decision about the future can help communities recover faster from a disaster, rebuild according to a shared community vision and be better prepared for the next natural disaster. Though there are many technolgoies being developed, it is very important to select the appropriate technology based on the available resources and adaptability level of people in any city to achieve smart and sustainable built environment for efficient disaster resilience.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Disaster resilience is becoming more and more important due to global changes and challenges like massive urbanisation, people moving to cities and climate change.
2. Disaster resilience is affected by three stages: pre-disaster solutions with prevention, during disaster processes, and post-disaster operations and building up the infrastructure and community again.
3. To properly enhance disaster resilience, the different levels and stakeholders need to work together and participate in finding and creating the proper solutions and using the proper technologies.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Can resilience be achieved or is this also a moving target?
2. Is resilience the basis for sustainability, or sustainability will follow resilience?
3. Is resilience, being able to withstand shocks and disasters, the final stage or could use it as a stepping stone for antifragility, growing and thriving with shocks and disasters? We talked about antifragility more in detail in research episode No.20 and during the interview with Bridgette Engeler in episode 021I.

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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