A new video shows the journey of seven cities towards a resilient future. Climate scenarios of increasing storms, floods and heat waves have lately become a reality and are putting citizens’ health and lives at risk as a result of climate change.

Human-made disasters such as terrorist attacks used to happen every 5 years in European cities and are now occurring several times a year. Local governments need to prepare their infrastructure for the worst in order to protect their communities, but these challenges transcend national borders and city limits.

“We are changing, the cities are changing, the world is changing and we also need to see outside the borders, to learn and to share information. And I think ICLEI is a great opportunity and a great platform for us to do that,” said Silje Solvang, Municipality of Kristiansand (Norway).

Cities need to work together to build a resilient urban environment where their communities can thrive. Kristiansand, along with the cities of Bristol (United Kingdom), Donostia (Spain), Glasgow (United Kingdom), Riga (Latvia), Rome (Italy) and Vejle (Denmark) have worked with research scientists, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and DIN to co-create and test a Resilience Management Guideline. The Resilience Management Guideline consists of five steps, which cities can follow to integrate resilience into their city planning.

Developing this guideline and the supporting tools has begun a movement to go beyond adapting infrastructure to climate change and spurred cities on towards boosting social cohesion and quality of life as a primary focus of resilience.

“When I initially came to the project it was very much about future proofing places and infrastructure,” said Lucy Vilarkin, city of Bristol. “For me, the emphasis has shifted onto people and organisations, and how we deal with tackling health issues and building healthy organisations.”

For more information, click here.

The cities of the Smart Mature Resilience project met for the closing occasion of SMR’s successful Tier 3 city programme last week in Bonn. While the project began with seven cities as full project partners, an additional seven cities have become active and engaged in the project, many of whose representatives are also active contributors to SMR’s standardization preparation activities.

Cities establish common ground

Giampaolo Tarpignati, Comune di Udine (Italy) represented SMR’s first official Tier 4 city and shared the inspiring story of how even a small municipality can become a local figurehead and can spur its larger-sized neighbour cities to take transformative action on resilience.

SMR’s partner city of Kristiansand (Norway) could identify with Udine’s situation. Silje Solvang, City of Kristiansand (Norway) said, “We are a very small city, we are only 90,000 inhabitants, and to learn and see that other cities have similar challenges and similar obstacles due to law and leadership and politicians: it has been very good for us to know that we're not the only one.”

Marco Cardinaletti, Project Manager, Region of Emilia-Romagna (Italy) shared innovative communication methods to disseminate project results to stakeholders in the fields of adaptation and resilience, including a children’s theatre performance.

Looking back over SMR’s co-creation practice

The SMR project was conducted according to the principles of co-creation. Discussions throughout the event produced a plethora of understandings and manifestations of this practice. Jose Maria Sarriegi, SMR project coordinator, emphasised the importance of finding balance for a productive co-creation process. On the one hand, he urged researchers to be open to adapting their models to the feedback and needs of end users. On the other hand, he urged end users to understand the benefits of making tools generic and adaptable: “We are creating the tools not just for them but for the whole community.”

From the point of view of cities, co-creation means involving colleagues and stakeholders from inside and outside the municipality, sharing the project outputs with them and feeding their perspectives back into the co-design process. “The most important thing we learned [through the SMR project] is the holistic approach to think resilience. Resilience has not been a familiar term, now it's becoming a familiar term, and it is how to cooperate with internal stakeholders, external stakeholders and how we all together move forward. When you work together and cooperate together, the outcome is resilient,” said Silje Solvang, City of Kristiansand.

Circle of Sharing and Learning

The project’s dissemination of project outputs to cities has followed a ‘Circle of Sharing and Learning’, whereby additional cities have become progressively involved in the project as it developed. The project began with the three core cities of Donostia (Spain), Glasgow (United Kingdom) and Kristiansand (Norway). These cities tested the project’s tools and are referred to as ‘Tier 1’ cities. The next ‘tier’ of cities; Bristol (United Kingdom), Rome (Italy), Riga (Latvia) and Vejle (Denmark) provided feedback and review to the tool testing process. This group is referred to as ‘Tier 2’. Each ‘Tier 2’ city was paired with a ‘Tier 1’ city, with whom they worked particularly closely.

“It’s been brilliant working with other European cities… It’s great having the ability to build a strong peer network with our counterparts of the European cities and also to get outside of our comfort zone. You can get very locked into your own way of thinking, a very UK-centric approach, so we’ve been able to widen our perspective and understand the other challenges other European cities are going through. It’s been great working with Donostia, they’re our Tier 2 City, so we’ve got to know a lot of the challenges they’ve got in their city and we’ve had great conversations with them and sharing our learning on resilience,” said Lucy Vilarkin, Bristol City Council.  

The first two tiers were full project partners. Communication and dissemination activities created a third tier of cities in the final year of the project, comprising Athens (Greece), Greater Amman Municipality (Jordan), Greater Manchester (United Kingdom), Malaga (Spain), Malmö (Sweden), Rekjavik (Iceland) and Thessaloniki (Greece). These cities were part of the ‘Tier 3’ and attended three in-person events and a series of webinars. At the in-person events and webinars, Tier 1 and Tier 2 city representatives facilitated and presented the project results, thereby transferring the knowledge they had gained through the project directly to the new cities. These Tier 3 cities signed an official Statement of Commitment to participate in the project.

“We, as the city of Thessaloniki, are very happy to be here, we were also in the event in Brussels a couple of weeks ago,” said George Dimarelos, City of Thessaloniki. “We have a big interest in cooperating and forming a network with other cities… in order to share our experiences and our challenges.”

The final ‘Tier 4’ is an open-ended group and may encompass cities beyond Europe and beyond the end of the project’s funding period. Helena Perxacs Motgé, Provincial Council of Barcelona (Spain) discussed the opportunities and challenges of the local economy and society to adapt to climate change. As part of her work in the Provincial Council of Barcelona, Ms Perxacs Motgé provides support to a number of municipalities in the province of Barcelona, works with stakeholders to improve local resilience and adaptation, particularly in terms of agriculture, forestry, fishery and tourism in different areas in Catalonia. Ms Perxacs Motgé found that the tools and methodologies developed by the SMR project could be directly applicable for this context, explaining, “It was good to get ideas from the tools and resources developed during the SMR project. We will try to implement and to use those in our project CLINOMICS, and to use these methodologies for the discussions with the stakeholders to increase their resilience and adaptation to climate change.” Udine (Italy) is the first city to return a signed Statement of Commitment to join the Tier 4. 

SMR co-organised the Open European Day at Bonn Resilient Cities, which saw the highest ever attendance and inspiring discussions. As a pre-event to Open European Day, SMR held its Final City Resilience Conference.

A photo gallery of the event is available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/iclei_europe/sets/72157693144111942/.

Representatives of over 30 cities and regions in Europe, the European Commission and scientific experts on resilience attended the 27th edition of ICLEI Europe’s Breakfast at Sustainability’s series. The event was hosted by the European office of the Basque Country and a welcome address was provided by – Ignacio de la Puerta, Director for Urban Planning of the Basque Government. A brief introduction to the Smart Mature Resilience project and its tools was provided by Vasileios Latinos, ICLEI Europe.

Mr de la Puerta emphasised in his words of welcome the need to provide space and quality of life for Basque residents. An integrated action plan, as well as participation in numerous local, regional and international projects and programmes, such as Donostia/San Sebastián’s participation in the Smart Mature Resilience Project are addressing this need. The path is a shared one and cities in Europe are welcome to join the Basque Country on this journey by considering the pathways towards transformative action laid out in the Basque Declaration.

Cities must work together in a coordinated way towards long-term resilience goals. For Ben Caspar, Team Leader for Urban Environment for the European Commission’s DG Environment, cities have enormous potential to overcome global challenges. The Pact of Amsterdam has made funding streams easier to understand and has led to enhanced support and cooperation between the European Commission and city networks. As well as funding the European Commission offers other resources to cities, including online tools, such as a new portal planned to be launched during Green Week. Ronny Frederickx, Former President and Good Governance Project Leader, UDITE considered resilience from the perspective of good governance, and warned that lack of trust in political leaders, lack of capacity and ‘segregation in craftsmanship’ or lack of cooperation as drivers of risk. He called for a good governance approach in order to overcome these challenges, as well as for a triangle between science, education and practice.

The innovative and inspiring “Room for the river Waal” project saw attitudes among citizens to the large-scale project turn from hostility and resistance, to sentiments among citizens of pride and ownership of the project. Ton Verhoeven, Arnhem Nijmegen City Region, Netherlands shared how this was achieved through intensive communication and engagement of stakeholders.

Glasgow and Rome are working together on their resilience journey: both cities are part of the Smart Mature Resilience project as well as ICLEI members and members of 100 Resilient Cities. Frankie Barrett, Glasgow City Council and Claudio Bordi, Risorse per Roma. Public authorities in Glasgow are as of recently obliged to involve communities as part of their work, and ongoing projects range across numerous topical areas, for example food security and land use. In Glasgow’s experience, "When citizens are not involved in the plan, it will fail." Rome has used a tool produced by the Smart Mature Resilience project, the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire, to hold cross-sectoral meetings with a goal to break silos and better understand risk.

Annette Figueiredo, Greater London Authority described a recently concluded audit of school air quality in London. Poor air quality has detrimental effects on children’s learning, and a survey revealed that over 360 schools were in poor air quality areas. The Mayor of London, as part of a vision to clean up London’s air received a petition from Greenpeace signed by 303 teachers calling for better air quality near schools, and fifty schools were selected.  The project involved the cooperation of the relevant boroughs, Transport for London, Public Health and other Greater London Authority programmes working with schools, researchers and academics. The collected data will be used in the schools’ curricula so that students can understand how it affects their lives.

For the second part of the day, Serene Hanania, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, invited cities to participate in an interactive workshop. Discussion groups considered topics such as heat waves, flood risks, social issues and emergency response and exchanged their experiences from their respective cities on the topics. The SMR project representatives then demonstrated how the tools co-produced in the project by cities and researchers could support the newcomer cities in overcoming the challenges they raised in the discussions.

In terms of flooding, cross-departmental silos were found to be a major challenge in British cities, as management of water courses was not closely linked to response mechanisms, and vulnerable groups were found to be more exposed to flood risk. Here, Nijmegen could explain their unique case, where better communication on water planning and management is possible due to Dutch water boards. The SMR City Resilience Dynamics tool was mentioned in a possible application to measure surface water interventions.

On the subject of heat waves, desertification and the benefits of reforestation were discussed for cities in Spain. In Italy, paradoxically, abandonment of agricultural areas and increase of rain has led to natural reforestation. The most vulnerable cities to heat waves were considered to be Athens and Rome. Here, the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire was recommended, as awareness of the risk of heat waves seriously underestimates the real mortality rate among elderly people during periods of extreme heat. Malmö, Sweden, expressed the benefits of exchanging with Southern cities with cultural experience of caring for the elderly during heat waves, as heat stress is becoming an increasing problem for Malmö. Here, better access to data on mortality rates would be helpful to gain political support for, elderly, patient and hospice care to take additional measures during heat waves.

A common feature of the cities was the importance of involving volunteers and NGOs in emergency response. While cities and municipalities must adhere to standards, guidelines and norms for emergency response, citizens can step in and provide non-professional support magnanimously, for example providing unofficial transport and meals to refugees. Dedicated policies for involving NGOs and volunteers are included in the Resilience Maturity Model.

IT solutions offer interesting innovative ways to prevent food waste and to build communities in new way. Representative democracy and transparent decision-making were considered to be crucial foundations for social resilience. Decreasing vulnerability is intricately connected to employment, and in the case of French regions, citizens can become alienated as a result of unemployment. 

The cities present shared many aspects and practices around emergency response. Most cities had emergency plans and the same way of responding to an emergency. Malmö provided another perspective, for example, that experts were called in the event of a crisis. In each of the cities, in many cases, those working in emergency response have other responsibilities under normal circumstances, where response takes preference over these duties during a crisis. Risk assessment was considered essential, and the SMR Risk Systemicity Questionnaire is available to be used as part of this process.

A photo gallery of the event is available at https://flic.kr/s/aHsmeXRgWi.

Nine ambitious local governments will join stakeholders from seven European cities in kicking off a new city collaboration programme as part of the Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project at a Stakeholder Dialogue in Thessaloniki (Greece) on 7 November 2017.

The event will see participating cities sharing and exchanging local government policies and tools for strategically building city resilience. European cities are facing increasingly frequent and intense hazards and risks as climate change and changing social demographics place their critical infrastructures under increasing pressure. Sharing good practices can help them plan ahead for known and unknown shocks and stresses.

As part of the SMR project, three so-called “Tier 1” cities, Glasgow (UK), Kristiansand (Norway) and Donostia/San Sebastian (Spain), have co-developed a suite of tools to support them and other cities in planning, budgeting and identifying replicable policies towards their resilience goals. A second group of “Tier 2” cities, Bristol (UK), Riga (Latvia), Rome (Italy) and Vejle (Denmark), has been closely observing and providing feedback on this process.

At the one-day Stakeholder Dialogue, these cities will share their knowledge of these tools and contextualise them in terms of real policies to a new group of “Tier 3” cities including Amman (Jordan), Athens (Greece), Greater Manchester (UK), Malaga (Spain), Malmö (Sweden), Reykjavik (Iceland), Stirling (UK) and Thessaloniki (Greece). The event will be officially opened by the Mayor of Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris.

Research as part of SMR has found that cities and their critical infrastructure are interdependent, and that cities can help further boost their own resilience by supporting and fostering resilience in other cities. SMR is supporting the potential for replication by working towards international standards in city resilience management.

The first CEN workshop initiated by SMR, spearheaded by German standardisation organisation DIN, CEN WS/88 - Functional Specification for a Resilience Information Portal is underway. Two further envisaged CEN Workshop Agreements, City Resilience Development - Maturity Model and City Resilience Development - Operational Guidance, will kick off in Thessaloniki on 8 November, following the Stakeholder Dialogue. To join the standardization processes, please contact rene.lindner@din.de.

For further information, visit the project website.

The Smart Mature Resilience project is undergoing an intensive training period, where local stakeholders in the core cities of Donostia/San Sebastian, Glasgow and Kristiansand are receiving in-depth training on how to use the latest tools developed by the project; the Resilience Building Policies Tool and the City Dynamics Model. Two stakeholder training workshops took place in Glasgow and in Kristiansand. Local stakeholders received training on how to use the City Dynamics Model (previously referred to as the System Dynamics Model), which supports the already available Resilience Maturity Model.

The City Dynamics Model helps users, specifically municipal employees and elected officials involved in strategic planning and city management, better understand the main elements of the resilience building process in their city. It helps them prioritize the most urgent policies they should implement in order for their city to build resilience and guides them in planning relevant activities at a local level. During the training session in Glasgow, the participants worked on a flood scenario, to identify the best policies to improve preparedness and critical infrastructure performance and to better anticipate future water management challenges. In Kristiansand, the case study focused on some of the aspects of the recently developed and adapted Kristiansand Action Plan, and more specifically on the policies that would advance urban, green growth in the Nordic port city.

Following the trainings, webinars will be held, where the Tier 2 cities of Rome, Riga and Vejle will be briefed on the training activities and results from the implementing cities, the tool developers of TECNUN, University of Navarra, CIEM Center for Integrated Emergency Management, University of Agder and co-creation partner ICLEI Europe, and will ask questions and provide feedback on the results. The SMR partner cities are also preparing to take over a mentoring role for the upcoming final pilot implementation of the project, where a new Tier 3 group of cities will join them in resilience building activities. The City Dynamics Model will be available on the SMR website at the beginning of November 2017.

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.

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/.

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.