Stalking resilience: Cities as vertebrae in society’s resilience backbone

Abstract

This paper presents the EU H2020 project Smart Mature Resilience, which takes advantage of the fact that many cities are committed to become increasingly resilient and have ongoing processes for urban resilience. Smart Mature Resilience develops resilience management guidelines based on a Resilience Maturity Model that engages a growing number of stakeholders and multi-level governance in order for cities to become vertebrae for society’s resilience backbone. In a dual approach, employing a systematic literature review of international resilience implementation approaches alongside group processes with experts, the Smart Mature Resilience project has developed a preliminary resilience maturity model consisting of five stages Starting, Moderate, Advanced, Robust and verTebrate (SMART) and a Systemic Risk Assessment Questionnaire. The SMART Resilience Maturity Model suggests two principal processes for the transition to resilience maturity: (1) A process of increasing engagement and collaboration with new stakeholder types, from local, to regional, to national to European in a growing resilience backbone, and (2) a process of quality improvement of policies for transitioning from a Safety-I to a Safety-II perspective (from risk assessment & mitigation to adaption to future surprises as conditions evolve).