The fifth edition of the SMR newsletter is out now. In this edition, read about our new online version of the Resilience Maturity Model, video interviews with each of SMR's 7 cities, the new Risk Systemicity Questionnaire, Resilience Information Portal, the launch of SMR's first standardisation process and the nomination of the SMR website for the Eurid web awards.

Read the latest newsletter here!

The Smart Mature Resilience project is undergoing another period of local stakeholder 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 are being developed at the moment.

The first stakeholder training workshop took place in Donostia-San Sebastian beginning of June 2017, while the next visit is already planned for middle of July in Glasgow. During these trainings, local stakeholders receive training on the use of the System Dynamics Model, which accompanies the Resilience Maturity Model that is already available online.

The System Dynamics Model allows its users, specifically municipal employees and elected officials that are engaged in activities connected to strategic planning and management of the city to train themselves and understand which the main elements of the resilience building process in their city are.

Following the training, a 2-tier webinar will be held, where the tier-2 city of Bristol will be informed on the training activities and results from the city of Donostia, the tool developers of Tecnun, University of Navarra and co-creation partner ICLEI Europe, while they will be able to ask questions and provide feedback on the results. Stay tuned for the webinar announcement or catch up with the results later.

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/.

The RESIN project is developing an e-Guide, which is an online platform designed to provide decision support for climate change adaptation planning by city administrators. It does this by:

• Providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the various steps and activities that an urban adaptation process consists of;

• Providing practical, user-oriented support to actually perform such an adaptation process;

• Providing a portal to the most relevant sources of information and supporting methods available on the web, including the provision of new tools and methods that are currently not available;

• Providing guidance (where attainable) for choosing the best approaches, methods, tools and information sources for particular situations and particular steps;

• Providing references to evidence based information;

The development of the e-Guide has just entered a new phase. The high-level design has been finished, and is recorded in an extensive document. It describes the functions of e-Guide, its intended use, its encompassing components and how they work together. It also gives the requirements for development and describes the development and test plan.

This means that the project will now focus on the development of the e-Guide, define how it will work, what it should look like and how it will interact with the user. This work is currently being undertaken in WP6. The first mock-up versions of the e-Guide have been shown to the consortium in the Manchester GA meeting of 9 May. A process to verify and enhance these designs with potential users is currently being undertaken.

Open European Day at Bonn Resilient Cities will bring European cities together to discuss their common challenges and share their successful solutions in a uniquely interactive event that sees cities taking centre stage and sharing cases from their most recent experiences in a conversational format. Innovation, co-creation and transformation in cities are the event’s three main themes and will frame the opening plenary and the break-out sessions. During the plenary, organizers ICLEI Europe and the European Environment Agency will open the day with the European Commission’s DG Research and DG CLIMA, the European Investment Bank, the Committee of the Regions and with the participating cities.

The event will include the OED Marketplace, where participants can share, display and discuss their latest ideas and results. The Marketplace will feature a Road to Adaptation Wall, an Adaptation Poetry Slam, where participants can present their organization or project in super-fast elevator pitches, and the day will finish with a musical exploration of the Sound of Adaptation.

The Open European Day programme is made up of interactive workshops where cities present a real-life challenge and explore solutions to these challenges with participants. On the topic of innovation, EASME and the European Commission will hear examples from Berlin Moabit and Valladolid on using technology for innovating adaptation. Ingrid Coninx (Wageningen University) and the European Investment bank will frame a discussion between Raffaella Gueze, City of Bologna and José Ferreira, City of Lisbon about innovative financing for climate adaptation, and Guimarães (Portugal) will share its experiences with innovation in multi-purpose nature-based solutions.

On the topic of co-creation, Athens (Greece) and the European Environment Agency will contribute on citizens as drivers of change, Peter Massini (City of London) will talk about adaptation and social inclusion and a discussion on co-creation with research and business will bring together contributions by Alistair Ford (University of Newcastle), Marjorie Breyton (Life DERRIS Project) and examples by the city of Vagos (Portugal), Valka (Latvia) and Exeter (UK).

Bratislava (Slovakia) and next year’s European Green Capital of Nijmegen (Netherlands) will share their impressions of how transformation manifests in a physical sense in their cities, facilitated by Birgit Georgi (Physical City Adaptation). The PLACARD project, the Provence of Potenza and the City of Vejle will explore how adaptation relates to the other urban development agendas, and a final Covenant of Mayors session on city transformation through administration will include contributions by Bilbao (Spain) and Copenhagen (Denmark).

Attendance at the Open European Day is free of charge to cities and registration is open at https://fs8.formsite.com/iclei12/form92/index.html. A draft programme is now available on the Bonn Resilient Cities website at http://resilientcities2017.iclei.org/open-european-day/.

On April 4, 2017 RESIN project partners Bratislava City and Comenius University (UNIBA) hosted a workshop aimed at drafting initial impact chains in order to start the assessment of vulnerability of the city and its infrastructures to the impacts of climate change. Throughout the preparation of the meeting, RESIN Partner and leader of WP2, Fraunhofer, helped and guided the City partners in order to harmonise the workshop with past workshops, which have already taken place in Bilbao or Manchester.

The meeting was thematically broken down into two sessions. The morning session focused more on urban population and the impacts of climate change on health and quality of life. The second (afternoon) session focused on green infrastructure: as a critical infrastructure, sensitive to climate change on hand a being a an important factor in adaptation and mitigation on the other. The associated climate change risks were pluvial flooding and heatwaves for the urban population and droughts in relation to green infrastructure. Altogether, 16 stakeholders joined the meeting; spatial planners and environmental managers as well as external stakeholders; representing social care and care for elderly and the Slovak hydrometeorological institute.

As part of the discussion, the point was raised of out how the results of vulnerability assessments can be utilised in terms of urban planning and prevention risk resulting from climate change risks. The outcomes of the meeting are currently being analysed, and further meetings are planned to engage further city stakeholders.

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.