Resilient cities and communities

technological redundancy, remains the most interesting among the three mentioned keywords132 . Leaving considerable margins during the design and planning phases, in terms of materials, urban density, availability of multiple networks and grids and in general multiple technological solutions, gives the city wider margins of safeguard functionalities and reactivity, assuring appropriate responses even in case of extreme conditions and events.

Resilient cities and communities

As we have seen, pursuing the resilience of cities enables a very pervasive approach and its comprehensive application influences, directly or indirectly, all the managing, planning and design factors of both existing and newly planned urban areas. The careful application of resilience principles helps to improve the general quality of local, metropolitan and regional planning, taking into account climatic, environmental and socioeconomic aspects. Although in the recent past resilience was mainly considered as opposed to vulnerability, currently the scientific community includes socioeconomic factors, as well as managerial, organizational and technological ones, in the broad concept of resilience. Conceiving urban resilience strictly as environmental sustainability would produce unpredictable and even negative effects on the management of natural,

132 Low B., Ostrom E., Simon C., Wilson J. 2003, Redundancy and Diversity: do they influence optimal management?, in Folke C., Colding J., Berkes F., Navigating Social-Ecological Systems, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 83-114.

socioeconomic and infrastructural resources which must be considered fundamental parts of any long-term strategy for sustainable development. This implies that strategies that only focus on sustainability could result in striving for unsustainable goals if the focus is only on improving efficiency within urban areas. In urban contexts and related surrounding territories, however, resilience is based on refining existing relationships. To produce adequate responses, before any possible extreme event, the evaluation framework must be clear, bearing in mind that flexibility is in general the most suitable option, considering that higher flexibility increases the chances for recovery. A logical framework comprising resilience and adaptive skills also includes current hazards and future risks, improving preventive strategies and mitigation/recovery processes133. The implementation of appropriate management tools, as well as land, building and planning management is also fundamental for urban resilience. Last but not least, establishing mechanisms and approaches aimed at adaptation, flexibility and innovation, understood as the ability to solve problems, improves response processes. This kind of approach, together with social empowering and an enhanced idea of community, leads to shared and aware decisions, thus contributing to improved dialogue between decision makers and civil society, developing stronger social ties,

133 Klein R. J. T., Nicholls R. J., Thomalia F. 2003, The Resilience of Coastal Megacities to Weather-Related Hazards, in Building Safer Cities. The Future of Disaster Risk, vol. 3, World Bank ed., Washington, pp. 101-120.

as well as better recognized and accepted leadership, triggering mindful reactions134 . Consciously managing natural and human environments and ensuring socio-ecological sustainability means considering environmental consequences in a transformative and adaptive framework, anticipating and if possible guiding transformations for future urban ecosystems.

134 Colucci A. 2012, Le città resilienti: approcci e strategie, Jean Monnet Centre, Pavia.

technological systems, digital tools, and smart grids serving urban communities

World population growth in urban areas underlines the increasing criticalities linked to urban management and administration, today reaching levels of such complexity that managers and policy decision makers are often forced to focus primarily on the mere maintenance of services, structures, and networks for the safety of citizens, perhaps neglecting other important aspects linked to the quality of life and general well-being, such as ensuring the pleasantness of the architectural and planning, or assuring redundancy of services. Urban complexity forces us to adopt an interdisciplinary approach, in order to interrelate environmental quality, quality of structures and services, and quality of life. These three factors are not related in a linear sequence, but rather influence each other according to mutual cause/effect relationships. Such complexity produces a multiplication of variables, generating very dissimilar and even contradictory scenarios. In order to organize an effective response to the complexity of contemporary urban management issues, we could start from the surrounding urban territorial scale, trying to organize limited territorial areas, applying a few virtuous principles to elementary units/modules of territory.

Those modules, identified by the number of inhabitants (between 1 000 and 2 500 citizens), the structural characteristics of the buildings, and the general use of the empty spaces (both those with infrastructure and green) can be defined as urban cells1 . Once the critical issues of each cell have been evaluated, and possible optimization strategies designed in view of available internal resources and impact mitigation, its relationship with the portions of territory bordering on it can be tackled, thus constructing a physical and conceptual relational network between the different urban areas. An urban cell can be considered as an “elementary territorial unit”; aggregation of those cells contributes to the creation of networks or Smart Grids2. Those grids were initially conceived to facilitate optimized management of energy resources. But energy is only one of the flows of urban metabolism that can be studied using this methodology; economic flows, flows of people, materials and waste can also be added, and last but not least, information flows (big data) can be analyzed and modified, to maximize the sustainability of the processes and raise the quality of life, with the final objective of making the current urban agglomerations increasingly inclusive future Smart Cities and Communities. Furthermore, in order to achieve the ambitious objective of simultaneously satisfying material and immaterial needs and consequently obtaining a general condition of

1 Gehl J. 2011, Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space, Island Press, Washington. 2 Wang W., Xu Y., Khanna M. 2011, A survey on the communication architectures in Smart grid, «Computer Networks», vol. 55, n. 15, pp. 3604-3629.