Do Smart Cities Projects Contribute to Urban Resilience? A Case Study Based in Taipei City, Taiwan

Abstract

The trend of urbanization has increased the urban density of cities, resulting in larger populations facing greater disaster-related threats and risks. Furthermore, climate change is expected to increase the frequency, intensity, and effects of specific types of extreme weather events, thus raising disaster risk. Increasing urban resilience is a key challenge of urban governance and is essential to the development of forward-looking plans for reducing vulnerability and disaster threats. Furthermore, the rapid advancement of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet of things (IoT) has led to the increasing application of technologies from these fields in urban governance. The implementation of ICTs- and IoT-based smart city projects is becoming increasingly common worldwide. Nevertheless, the following questions require exploration: Do those smart city projects contribute significantly to urban resilience significantly? How should the performance of such projects be evaluated with respect to the dimensions of urban resilience? Accordingly, the main purpose of the present study was to develop an assessment toolkit and evaluate the contribution of smart city projects implemented in Taipei City. Two evaluation systems were developed, and eight experts were invited to participate in the evaluations. The first evaluation system involved “design principles for creating more resilient cities” developed by ResilientCity.org. The second system involved the “City Resilience Index” established by Arup Group Limited. After a screening was conducted, 10 Taipei-based smart city projects were selected as study cases, and the evaluation results for these projects with respect to multiple dimensions were discussed. The assessment toolkit introduced in the present study can be used by the city government to formulate strategies for addressing multiple problems. For example, future smart city projects should emphasize the design principles of redundancy and diversity. Furthermore, current ICTs- or IoT-based smart city projects overemphasized the characteristics of new technology and sometimes neglected key issues such as empowering stakeholders, which may result in challenges related to urban resilience enhancement and sustainable urban management.