Page 55 - U4SSC Simple ways to be smart

It is very important to have the participation of all operators that serve the same region. If the tram
operator does not provide its data, for instance, this mode will not be used to calculate the best
route for the passenger and the quality of the service will be reduced.

Although large and complex public transport networks may benefit more, the ease of use and the
low cost of the solution suggest that it may be viable even for small cities with a few routes. This is
especially true if the city receives tourists and other visitors or is part of a larger metropolitan area.

3.5 City resilience

Resilience can be defined as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their abilities to
absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations
or state variables”. Urban resilience has been explained as the “ability of human settlements
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and organisations to recover quickly from and continue to prosper in the context of increasing
impacts of natural and man-made changes or disasters”. A resilient city is one which can “tolerate
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disruptions before reorganising around a new set of structures and can anticipate, prepare for,
respond to and recover from a disturbance”. Urban resilience is increasingly important as the
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number of city-dwellers grows and natural disasters and social tensions threaten the regular life
of cities.

Most pertinently, the importance of resilience has been highlighted since the Covid-19 pandemic.
States, businesses and individuals have called attention to the need for greater resilience of cities
in the face of the pandemic and the subsequent food shortages and economic challenges.

Smart technologies give cities new tools for taking preventive measures, responding to emergencies,
and planning for longer-term sustainability and growth. Kupers & Ching developed a resilience
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framework for smart cities, with three main categories of:

• Structural resilience which refers to the ‘systemic and infrastructure aspects of resilience’.
• Integrative resilience which highlights the ‘complex interconnections of the system’.

• Transformative resilience which examines broader capacity issues and longer time horizons in
terms of distributed governance, foresight capacity and innovation and experimentation.

Cities have recorded success in improving the quality of life of their residents by improving their
structural, integrative and transformative resilience. Singapore, a very water-scarce area, improved
its water system by using new techniques and technologies, from desalination to setting specific
water catchment areas. Bogotà worked on the social issues mushrooming from heavy traffic
problems, expanded its sidewalks and saw a decline in crime rates in some neighbourhoods as a
result. The Netherlands enhanced its flood management system by designing new infrastructure
and technologies. In all these cases, uncalled-for social and infrastructural problems were countered
through the use of smart designs and technologies.

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