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.

Strath-Wide was a one-day conference which aimed to bring together researchers from all disciplines to share their research and find out what other researchers are doing across the University. The plenary talk was given by Professor Gerardo Adesso from the University of Nottingham about his own research path and experience of difficulties turned into successes. Additionally, there was opportunities to network with other research staff, keynote talks by invited members of University staff and prizes for the best presentations.

Abstracts were accepted for oral or poster presentations and grouped according to the University’s new strategic themes and awards were presented for each theme plus a poster prize at the conclusion of the conference. The Smart Mature Resilience team was awarded under the "Society and Policy" topical areas.

The presentation was authored by Igor Pyrko, Susan Howick, and Colin Eden, and it was titled ‘Smart Mature Resilience’ – in this presentation we described the aims of the project, whilst focussing in particular on the construction of the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire. The presentation was awarded as part of the ‘Policy and Society’ strategic theme of the University of Strathclyde.

Resilience depends on cooperation between cities, communities and regions and strengthening collaboration and cross-sectoral cooperation. Institutional and cultural differences can create barriers and impediments to holistic cooperation between departments in different municipalities.

The SMR project is undertaking preparatory work towards standardization to address these challenges. CEN workshop 88 is already underway, which establishes functional specifications for a Resilience Information Portal.

On 8th November 2017, two further CEN workshops will be kicked off, focusing on standardized approaches to resilience strategy and management. The CEN Workshop on 'City Resilience Development - Operational Guidance will develop a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA), which will define an operational framework that provides guidance and aims at training and supporting municipalities and their stakeholders. More information is available on the SMR website.

The CEN Workshop on 'City Resilience Development - Maturity Model' will develop a CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) defining a framework to show the ideal path in the resilience building process of a city. This framework will be based on maturity stages a city should go through. The standard is targeted to policy and decision makers at city level and councilors working for resilience in their city, as well as to any other city stakeholders working on resilience (e.g. critical infrastructure providers, emergency services, citizens, media, non-governmental organizations, academic and research institutions). To participate in the standardization processes, please contact To join the standardization processes, please contact rene.lindner@din.de. More information is available on the SMR website.

The Smart Mature Resilience team from the University of Strathclyde was awarded "Best Paper" at the Group Decision and Negotiation conference in Stuttgart from 14-18 August 2017, a major international management science and group decision conference. The awarded paper was authored by Colin Eden, Igor Pyrko, and Susan Howick and is entitled ‘Knowledge Acquisition Using Group Support Systems’. The paper describes the work undertaken to gather data for the construction of the Risk Systemicity Quesionnaire (RSQ) as part of the SMR project, which involved a new approach for using a Group Support System for research.

The paper reports on the use of a Group Support System (GSS) to acquire vast knowledge from city participants in seven European cities with respect to the interactions between risk events faced by the cities. Data collection took part during three workshops conducted as part of the Smart Mature Resilience project funded by the H2020 programme, and it was concerned with topics related to critical infrastructure, social dynamics, and climate change. The aim of data collection was to inform the construction of a Risk Systemicity Questionnaire (RSQ) which is an interactive tool designed to support cities in improving their resilience.

A series of GSS workshops was organized in which participants co-created the risk scenarios that formed the main content of the tool. While GSS have been previously used successfully to improve the productivity of team meetings, its use for acquisition of vast knowledge is under-researched. This paper presents an approach to using a GSS to inform specific research questions rather than to develop new solutions which participants can take ownership of and implement immediately in their work. In turn, the use of GSS in such non-traditional context poses a number of important methodological considerations of which GSS facilitators should be aware.

Firstly, the GSS provides an advantage of acquiring vast knowledge efficiently and significantly quicker than gaining evidence from literature. It may be argued that evidence from literature provides more accurate data, however, the GSS data can be validated incrementally as the data is analysed and used. Secondly, when GSS is applied to acquire vast knowledge in a relatively short amount of time, unlike traditional uses of the GSS, there is a tension between speed and efficiency and building group ownership versus validation of the knowledge acquired. However, when busy experts are involved, efficient knowledge acquisition may be the only realistic approach for conducting the research. And thirdly, this paper presents an argument that experts’ collaboration and communication within a GSS-facilitated workshop can be a more effective way of preparation for future risks rather than exclusively relying on past events.

The full paper is available in the conference proceedings on the GDN website.

Three new cities: Reykjavik (Iceland), Malaga (Spain)and Stirling (United Kingdom) have joined the Smart Mature Resilience project's Tier 3. These cities will be the first project-external cities to receive tailored access to the project's five tools: the Maturity Model, Risk Systemicity Questionnaire, Resilience Information Portal, Policy Tool and Simulation Model.

The first in-person meeting of the new project cities (further cities to be announced) with the SMR project cities will take place on 7th November in Thessaloniki, Greece. Registration for this event has now opened and more information is available at http://smr-project.eu/news/events/?c=search&uid=19d972c8.

The second collaborative newsletter between European projects working on resilience is out now! In this issue: 1) Smart Mature Resilience Project: Online Maturity Model launched, 2) DARWIN Project: Join the DARWIN Community of Practitioners, 3) RESILENS Project: Realising European Resilience for Critical Infrastructure, 4) Improver Project: Register now for our next workshop on the 21st September, 5) SMR invites cities to Thessaloniki workshop on strategic resilience planning, 6) Smart Mature Resilience project: Hear from the SMR cities.

To read the newsletter, click here.

The SMR project has been working for just over two years to develop a suite of tools to help cities enhance their resilience. These tools have been developed in close cooperation between seven partner cities of Glasgow, San Sebastian, Kristiansand, Rome, Riga, Bristol and Vejle, SMR's four university partners, ICLEI Europe and standardization body DIN.

The cities have been working with researchers to develop five strategic support and discussion formats that the cities are using to identify and select policies they should implement to address weaknesses in their resilience management, to develop long-term resilience strategies as well as structures for cross-departmental cooperation outside of the usual 'silos'.

Now that the tools are being finalised, they will be shared with a wider group of cities at a Stakeholder Dialogue event in Thessaloniki, Greece. Three tools are already available to cities: the Resilience Maturity Model, Risk Systemicity Questionnaire and Resilience Engagement and Communication Tool. Two further tools: a System Dynamics Model and a collection of Resilience Policies will be completed before the event.

Registration for the Stakeholder Dialogue will open soon. For more information, please contact clara.grimes@iclei.org.

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.