A good practice for integrating stakeholders through standardization—The case of the smart mature resilience project

Abstract

A priority must be made on making cities more resilient against crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic to help plan for an uncertain future. However, due to the insufficient transfer of knowledge from, among others, research projects to cities, they are often unaware of the resilience tools available as well as possible standardization activities to foster the integration of relevant stakeholders. To address this issue, this paper analyzes the use of standards and the contribution to standardization in a multi-case study of nine European Framework Program projects and with the Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project, a more in-depth case study. SMR integrated several European cities in its co-creative approach for developing city resilience tools and the related standards series CWA 17300 on ‘City Resilience Development’. Furthermore, the paper defines five steps for integrating standardization in research projects with a focus on (city) resilience and shows the benefits of the standardization process for fostering the engagement of relevant stakeholders.