Resilient Smart Cities

This book provides a thorough guide to building resilient cities, through the use of smart solutions enabled by information and communication technologies. It introduces innovative approaches for integrating smart solutions into urban resilience planning and offers numerous global case studies to illustrate the benefits of the theories discussed. Against a background of increased natural disasters, pandemics, and climate change, this book answers research questions such as: • Do smart city projects contribute to urban climate resilience? • What are the indicators of smart city resilience? • What procedures should be taken to improve efficacy of smart city solutions? • What are the opportunities and challenges for promoting smart city resilience and for integrating resilience thinking into smart city planning? Including contributions from international experts, explanatory illustrations, and data-driven tables, this book is of interest to researchers, policymakers, and graduate students focused on developing more sustainable, smart, and resilient cities.

Smart, Resilient and Transition Cities: Emerging Approaches and Tools for Climate-Sensitive Urban Development starts with a presentation of three widespread Urban Metaphors, which are gaining increasing attention from urban planners and decision-makers: Smart City, Resilient City and Transition Towns, being all of them focused on the need for enhancing cities’ capacities to cope with the multiple and heterogeneous challenges threatening contemporary cities and their future development and, above all, with climate issues. Then, the Authors provide an overview of current large-scale and urban strategies to counterbalance climate change so far undertaken in different geographical contexts (Europe, United States, China, Africa and Australia), shedding light on the different approaches, on the different weights assigned to mitigation and adaptation issues as well as on the main barriers hindering their effectiveness and translation into measurable outcomes. Opportunities and criticalities arising from the rich, ‘sprawled’ and ‘blurred’ landscape of current strategies and initiatives in the face of climate change pave the way to a discussion on the lessons learnt from current initiatives and provide new hints for developing integrated climate strategies, capable to guide planners and decision makers towards a climate sensitive urban development Smart, Resilient and Transition Cities: Emerging Approaches and Tools for Climate-Sensitive Urban Development merges a scientific approach with a pragmatic one. Through a case study approach, the Authors explore strengths and weaknesses of institutional and informal practices to foreshadow innovative paths for an adaptive process of urban governance in the face of climate change. The book guides the reader along new governance paths, characterized by continuous learning and close cooperation and communication among different actors and stakeholders and, in so doing, helps them to overcome current ‘siloed’ approaches to climate issues. Links resilience, smart growth, low-carbon urbanism, climate-friendly cities, sustainable development and transition cities, being all these concepts crucial to improve effective climate policies Includes a number of case studies showing how cities, different in size, geographical, cultural and economic contexts are currently dealing with climate issues, grasping synergies and commonalities arising from current institutional practices and transition initiatives Provides strategic and operative guidelines to overcome barriers and critical issues emerging from current practices, promoting cross-sectoral approaches to counterbalance climate change

This book aims to establish a community with attention to land use to achieve sustainable development and meet the needs of today’s society. Urban planning depends on engineering, architectural, social and political pillars. It pursues this by proposing solutions, regulating environmental pollution and non-sustainable use of available resources. It showcases and even triggers further debate about connections between sustainable development, urban planning and technology in hopes of achieving sustainable development models that sustain urban expansion and shape cities that improve the overall quality of life. It views urban planning and development as vital fields that ensure the application of revolutionary approaches with new materials and processes incorporated in the most efficient manner.

This book focuses on the ways in which resiliency can foster the transformation of cities. There is a growing need for our cities to be transformed into “smart” cities; in this regard, tremendous efforts are called for in order to face the environmental challenges that play a major role in the creation or transformation of cities and environments. This book covers a broad range of applications and approaches that are “smart” and “resilient,” which, when combined, offer much more flexibility concerning the future of our cities. Consequently, this simple combination, which is producing sweeping changes around the globe, has attracted considerable attention from scholars and decision-makers alike.

This book aims to integrate climate mitigation and adaptation tools into conventional urban planning. It emphasizes the value and importance of ICT as connected technology. The author believes that ICT and IOT can facilitate controlling climate change attributes when deployed with appropriate ingredients and composition in cities in an integrated comprehensive manner. It was written with the author's firm belief that cities play an important role in mitigating climate change by reducing energy consumption, promoting the use of renewable energy sources, or by trading emission permits and selling Certified Emission Rights (CERs). This book looks at green growth based on the circular economy using green smart technology as a sustainable tool for green economic development. Also for climate change adaptation, cities have to take actions to reduce the adverse impacts of climate change on people, property and ecosystems in the urban planning process. It has been written with the author's works for Urban Environment Accords (UEA) and International Urban Training Center (IUTC) in collaboration with UNEP, World Bank, UNFCCC and UN-HABITAT. It can be used as a training source book for city climate planners and urban practitioners of local governments. It will be utilized as a more practical guidebook for climate change policy makers as well as a futuristic research agenda for next generations.

Following on from the success of the first edition, Smartcities + Eco-Warriors (2010), this book is the latest innovative response on urban resilience from one of the world’s leading urban design and architectural thinkers. An ecological symbiosis between nature, society and the built form, the Smartcity cultivates new spatial practices and creates diverse forms of resilient landscapes including and beyond urban agriculture. The notion of the Smartcity is developed through a series of international case studies, some commissioned by government organisations, others speculative and polemic. This second edition has nine new case studies, and additional ecological sustainability studies covering sensitivity, design criteria, and assessments for ecological construction plans. The book concludes with two new essays on the romance of trees and the empowering nature of resilient landscapes. Smartcities, Resilient Landscapes + Eco-warriors represents a crucial voice in the discourse of climate change and the potential opportunities to improve the ecological function of existing habitats or create new landscapes which are considered beneficial to local ecology and resilience. It is indispensable reading for practitioners and students in the fields of landscape, urban design, architecture and environmental engineering. An inspiration to government agencies and NGOs dealing with sustainability, this work also resonates with anyone concerned about cities, landscapes, food and water security, and energy conservation.

Are pandemics the end of cities? Or, do they present an opportunity for us to reshape cities in ways making us even more innovative, successful and sustainable? Pandemics such as COVID-19 (and comparable disruptions) have caused intense debates over the future of cities. Through a series of investigative studies, Designing Smart and Resilient Cities for a Post-Pandemic World: Metropandemic Revolution seeks to critically discuss and compare different cases, innovations and approaches as to how cities can utilise nascent and future digital technology and/or new strategies in order to build stronger resilience to better tackle comparable large-scale pandemics and/or disruptions in the future. The authors identify ten separate societal areas where future digital technology can impact resilience. These are discussed in individual chapters. Each chapter concludes with a set of proposed "action points" based on the conclusions of each respective study. These serve as solid policy recommendations of what courses of action to take, to help increase the resilience in smart cities for each designated area. Securing resilience and cohesion between each area will bring about the metropandemic revolution. This book features a foreword by Nobel laureate Peter C. Doherty and an afterword by Professor of Urban Technologies, Carlo Ratti. It provides fresh and unique insights on smart cities and futures studies in a pandemic context, offers profound reflections on contemporary societal functions and the needs to build resilience and combines lessons learned from historical pandemics with possibilities offered by future technology.