The Smart Mature Resilience project is working towards standardized methods to build resilience in European cities. The workshop will aim at developing consensus-based list of requirements on how municipalities could equip an information system that facilitates building up resilience through collaboration, communication, and engagement. This marks the functional specification for a Resilience Information Portal.

The kick-off meeting will be held on 21 June 2017 in Brussels at ICLEI Europe. All interested parties are welcome to register for participation and submit comments on the draft Project Plan to Workshop Secretary, René Lindner no later than 16 June 2017.

The final deliverable of this Workshop (CEN/CWA) is expected to be finalized in November 2017.

Details of the event are available at http://smr-project.eu/news/events/?c=search&uid=d799f4d1.

The SMR project has presented its tools and standardization activities to the plenary meeting today in Berlin of ISO/TC 268: Sustainable cities and communities. The project's tools and the standardization potential for city resilience were presented by Holger Robrecht (ICLEI Europe), Vasileios Latinos (ICLEI Europe) and Rene Lindner (DIN). Standardization in the field of Sustainable Cities and Communities will include the development of requirements, frameworks, guidance and supporting techniques and tools related to the achievement of sustainable development considering smartness and resilience, to help all Cities and Communities and their interested parties in both rural and urban areas become more sustainable.

The proposed series of International Standards will encourage the development and implementation of holistic and integrated approaches to sustainable development and sustainability. TC 268 will contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals through its standardization work.

As part of SMR’s standardization work, the project has identified the following standards particularly relevant for resilient cities are:

- ISO 37101: aims at helping cities and communities to better coordinate participatory development and implementation of a local sustainability programme. The standard supports good governance by describing a coherent, community-based management approach. A practical guidance for cities on practical implementation is under development (ISO 37104).

- ISO 37120: recommends a selection of indicators for local reporting on life-quality. The selection is voluntary and based on local priorities.

- ISO 37150: provides a reference framework for “Smart urban infrastructures” based on ISO 22325, ISO 22316 and BS 65000 Organizational Resilience.

SMR supports the dissemination and mainstreaming of resilience by engaging in standardization activities with DIN to create a standard for resilience management.

Glasgow City Council welcomed project partners, project cities and local stakeholders to the Lighthouse, Glasgow this morning for the first day of the Smart Mature Resilience project’s review workshop. During the morning session, the partners built on progress made at the project’s recent workshop, where European cities and a group of projects focusing on related topics met to compare tool development and discuss the optimal conditions for developing possible standards for resilience management in cities.

The SMR project is developing a Resilience Management Guideline supported by five tools, which provides a pathway to lead cities towards a more resilient future. Each tool serves a complementary purpose. The Resilience Maturity Model helps cities to identify their level of resilience maturity and helps them to identify policies that would be helpful measures towards resilience-building. The Risk Systemicity Questionnaire can bring together diverse stakeholders in a city to better understand their awareness of risk and the interrelatedness of risk. The Resilience Information Portal can provide useful software to cities, which they can use to make their communication system more resilient.

During the workshop in Glasgow, cities and scientific partners worked closely together to continue co-development of the System Dynamics Model, which is a game-like online learning tool to help strategic managers and other stakeholders involved in budgeting and strategic planning for resilience in cities identify and decide the most efficient and most strategically accurate policies to implement, and the order in which to do this.

The tool functions with an interactive interface, where users input a symbolic budget for resilience development and adjust the proportional investment in different areas regarding resilience for their city. The user can then run simulations of the effects of prioritizing investment in different areas in different order, using the tool as a kind of playground to trial methods of policy prioritization in a safe environment. Intensive collaborative sessions and exercises with TECNUN, University of Navarra and CIEM, University of Agder collected input from the SMR cities of Glasgow, Kristiansand, Donostia, Vejle, Rome, Riga and Bristol to validate the tool and ensure that it is an ideal format for immediate application and use by cities.

A further tool for Resilience Policies will then provide information, examples and case studies of the policies identified through the Resilience Maturity Model and the System Dynamics Model. The workshop will continue tomorrow with sessions hosted by the University of Strathclyde to work with cities on co-developing this tool.

Impressions of the first day are available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/iclei_europe/sets/72157683833382116/with/34331508890/. You can find out more about Glasgow and SMR at http://smr-project.eu/glasgow/.

Representatives of eleven European cities and communities as well as scientific experts in the field of resilience as well as the standardisation committees ‘Security and Resilience’ and ‘Sustainable cities and communities’ met in Berlin on 4th April 2017 to discuss resilience in cities and communities with a particular focus on the potential of standardisation to support high-quality management and decision-making at city level as a key element in fostering effective resilience development in cities.

European resilience projects SMR, DARWIN, IMPROVER, RESILIENS, RESOLUTE, Resccue and RESIN convened at this event, as they are working towards similar goals, and could see the benefit in an open discussion of their current state of progess. The day opened with a summary of the current status and progress made so far by each project, keeping in mind potential for collaboration and sharing of results. The presentations showed that the different projects have a variety of focus areas, priorities and methods, while all working towards mutually complementary goals. Smart Mature Resilience and RESIN bring together cities and researchers to investigate and build urban resilience in European cities. While both projects take cities as their particular areas of interest, SMR encompasses the wider spectrum of resilience aspects including social dynamics, while RESIN pinpoints the relevance of climate change adaptation as part of resilience-building.

The RESILENS and IMPROVER projects take critical infrastructures as their main focus, and IMPROVER was of particular interest to the cities present due to the project's plans to develop a game-based training app. Like IMPROVER, RESOLUTE will develop a game-based mobile e-learning tool. Finally, the comprehensive RESCCUE project showed the comprehensive scope of the five-year project and its Hazar tool.

The cities then joined a city-specific workshop while the research projects compared the overlaps between their project outputs so far and the prospects for combining or contributing to one anothers' tools. In the city workshop, cities shared their resilience challenges and examples of good practice and contributed to how they might see standardization supporting their local resilience-building process.

SMR has completed and shared its latest tool, the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire (RSQ), which is now available to cities. The RSQ is an Excel based tool where users are asked to consider the relative likelihood of a broad range of risks in their cities. These risks are spread across 9 topics: health, climate change (air pollution), climate change (flooding), social inequalities, ageing (population), riots, immigration, social cohesion and social alienation and are considered as networks of interrelated risks. 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.

Based on the responses to the questions contained in each of the topics of the RSQ, participants are provided with a relative risk score (an estimated risk level for the city) and an awareness score (the level of knowledge the city has about the possible risk scenarios). In addition to this, users can access policies recommendations that may be used to address those risk scenarios that are of most threat to the city.

Not only does completing the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire help cities to assess their exposure to risk, but it also indicates their level of awareness of risk and where cities should prioritise their efforts. The purpose of the questionnaire is for it to be used by groups of users with diverse areas of expertise so that it can prompt valuable discussions where different stakeholders’ experiences can be brought together to determine a city’s priorities to enable them to anticipate and appropriately respond to future challenges.

Standardisation is quickly becoming a key approach in resilience management and in climate change management for cities, but it is often not easy for cities to know where to start. The Smart Mature Resilience project will hold a workshop next week in Berlin to help to respond to cities’ queries and to empower them to take the next steps in using standards in their resilience management next week in DIN, Berlin, Germany. The workshop will include insights from the cutting-edge European projects working on the latest resilience and climate change adaptation science: SMR, DARWIN, IMPROVER, RESILIENS, RESO-LUTE, Resccue, RESIN, SmartResilience, as well as expert presentations from standardization committees ‘Security and Resilience’ and ‘Sustainable cities and communities’.

Following the presentations, the afternoon will focus on the cities themselves and their experience, discussing the challenges and needs of cities and communities for becoming more resilient and exploring possible solutions and good practices. Finally, a gap analysis will help to boost cities ambitious plans to make the most of existing standards to plan strategic resilience management that is coherent with their peer cities and will help to provide a robust foundation for their citizens.

Cities can still register for the workshop at http://smr-project.eu/news/events/berlin-workshop/.

Cities in Europe are facing increasing challenges and threats to citizens' safety and stability. Climate change is flooding homes and causing unprecedented storms, and cities are struggling to provide accommodation and support to their elderly and refugees fleeing war. Scientists and cities have been working intensively across Europe to investigate how to best provide cities with the support they need to enhance their cities and communities to be sustainable, resilient and prepared to handle the hazards ahead. European research projects working on the topic of resilience will come together at a unique workshop in Berlin to present their progress and discuss with cities their challenges and needs for becoming more resilient as well as sharing effective solutions and best practices.

The workshop is organised by DIN and will be held in the DIN premises in Berlin. In the final session of the workshop, standardisation will be discussed, and the way in which the development of standards can potentially support the resilience-building process in cities.

Limited travel support is available to city representatives for attending the workshop. For more information, please see the SMR website.

Eneko Goia, Mayor of San Sebastian, welcomed the Smart Mature Resilience project to San Sebastian City Hall on 6th March 2017, emphasizing that “cities are the ideal scale for working on resilience”. Resilience-building is crucial to for San Sebastian, as the coastal city is already experiencing the consequences of climate change, particularly flooding. As the mayor joked, “The sea wants to recover all of those places we took in the past!” The project is developing a new Resilience Management Guideline, which helps cities to make the right decisions and policies to build resilience. This guideline is designed to be useable not only by the project cities, but by all European and global cities. Resilient cities support one another and bolster each other’s ability to recover from shocks and stresses.

“We are building the boat and sailing,” in the words of project coordinator Jose Mari Sarriegi, Tecnun, University of Navarra: the project partners, scientists and cities of San Sebastian, Glasgow, Kristiansand, Bristol, Vejle, Rome and Riga collaborate closely on developing the tools. Two of the tools are complete and are now available for use by cities: the Resilience Maturity Model and the Resilience Information Portal . A Risk Systemicity Questionnaire has been developed and tested in cooperation with the project cities, and this will be launched in the coming months.

The final two tools, the Resilience Policies Portfolio and the System Dynamics Model, are currently being developed. The System Dynamics Model is a game-style simulation programme that allows users to explore the effectiveness of implementing different resilience policies, helping to show which kinds of policies should be implemented in which order as the ideal trajectory towards a resilient city. The project partners and stakeholders are working on testing the model during the San Sebastian meeting, following which the tool developers will integrate the feedback gathered into the final, public version of the tool.

For information in Spanish, please see here.

For more information, please see www.smr-project.eu.

Smart Mature Resilience is undergoing an intensive period of local training, where local stakeholders in the core cities of Donostia, Glasgow and Kristiansand are receiving in-depth training on the use of the SMR tools that have been developed so far.

Training visits began in January 2017 in Donostia, where local stakeholders received training on the use of the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire and the Resilience Information and Communication Portal. Following the training, a 2-tier webinar was held, where Tier 2 city of Bristol heard from the city of Donostia, the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire tool developers at Strathclyde and co-creation partner ICLEI a summary of the results of the training, asked questions and provided feedback on the results.

The process continued this week in Kristiansand, where stakeholders received training on the Resilience Information and Communication Portal and provided input for a webpage on Kristiansand via the tool. Training is currently continuing in Kristiansand on the Resilience Maturity Model. Following training in Kristiansand, Tier 2 partner Vejle will attend a webinar to receive a summary of the results, provide feedback and gain an insight into the outcomes of the training.

Training will continue next week in Donostia on the Resilience Maturity Model, followed by Risk Systemicity Questionnaire training in Kristiansand and accompanying webinars, before Glasgow completes the last phase of the training on all three tools.

Bristol (United Kingdom) has laid out its path towards greater resilience by officially launching its Resilience Strategy last Monday, comprising resilience pillars, goals and transformative actions to be realised over the next 50 years. The council shared the ‘Bristol Resilience Strategy’ - a framework to protect Bristol against potential shocks and pressures it may encounter in the future.

As the plan is looking ahead over the next 50 years, there is a large focus on young people and how they can help build a more resilient future for the city. Many of the ideas included in the strategy will benefit the next generation, these include; votes for 16 year olds, free bus travel for U16s and a vision for a child-friendly city.

Marvin Rees, Mayor of Bristol, said: “Resilience speaks to everything that we do and this strategy will help us, our partners and the community develop a strong plan for our shared future.

“By setting out a clear and deliberate vision of what and where we want to be as a city, we hope to be better placed to deal with issues that affect us now and into the future.

“We need to take bold action to make sure that Bristol is able to adapt, develop and deliver change effectively and in the best interests of everyone who lives and works here. I’m pleased that we have this opportunity to work with our communities and include people in owning and shaping our long term future. Together we can help make sure everyone feels the benefit of Bristol’s strengths and success whilst being best protected from everything life throws at us.”

The strategy, which has been drawn up with key stakeholders, aims to build on the work already being done to make the city socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. It sets out intentions to create a ‘flourishing’ city and tackle some of Bristol’s major issues, including, traffic congestion, affordable housing and child poverty.

Bristol is a Tier-2 city of Smart Mature Resilience. As part of the project, Bristol is working closely together with its Tier 1 city partner of Donostia (Spain) and the project scientists to develop tools to support resilience development in both cities and in other cities around Europe.

Bristol City Council has already contributed to the development of the new Resilience Information Portal, a collaborative environment designed to facilitate awareness and engagement among key partners in resilience building. A prototype of the platform is already available online, and cities are invited to make use of this free tool to complement their internal and external communication platforms within their city administration and as part of communicating resilience-related information with their citizens.

Bristol has also been actively involved in developing the Resilience Maturity Model, which enables cities to self-assess its resilience status and provides a roadmap for how cities’ resilience development could be rolled out. The Maturity Model is already online and available for cities to download and use.

Bristol has also contributed to pilot testing of the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire, which is currently under development by the University of Strathclyde. The Risk Systemicity Questionnaire is an interactive tool that allows users to assess their cities’ risks and risk preparedness and suggests possible policies that could be adopted in order to make the cities more resilient against these risks.

The city’s engagement in the Smart Mature Resilience project is one of the ways in which Bristol is taking steps to achieve its resilience aims, such as making the city’s success available to all and addressing the challenges of inequality in health and access to economic opportunities by supporting and empowering the city’s diverse communities.