Smart Cities Are Resilient Cities

BY JONATHAN REICHENTAL

Changes in how we work, live, and play, coupled with an unpredictable climate, mean that cities must evolve quickly and be able to respond to shocks. City leaders and stakeholders must plan and build for a variety of future possibilities. Being smart about resiliency is a core requirement of smarter and more sustainable communities.

Urbanization is occurring all over the world. About 80% of cities are growing today. We’re adding about 3 million people to cities every single week and building infrastructure the size of Manhattan every month—and we’ll do that for the next 40 years. Cities are also the center of GDP in almost every country. Cities are incredible places, and they are our future.

Of course, we have a lot of challenges. We have to fix some very urgent issues, including our love affair with the automobile, hyperconsumerism, and extreme inequalities among our populations.

The opportunity to innovate and deliver new products and services to our cities, to make them smarter and resilient, is worth $2.4 trillion by 2025. And if we look even broader, our urban innovation activities can create $20 trillion of new economic value by 2030, which is very motivating.

That takes us to the topic of resiliency, which is the ability to bounce back and recover quickly from shocks. Are cities ready?

What will it take for that to happen? The future is never a straight line. We know that things are going to surprise us. We can’t think of everything, but we can be more prepared. We need to ensure that big issues don’t happen—but when they do, that cities can recover quickly and bounce back on a positive trajectory. And then, we can be on a path to transforming our societies so they are strengthened and more resilient over time.

Climate Crisis

One of the most significant areas of resiliency is our ability to be prepared for the eventualities of the climate crisis. About 550 global cities are on coastlines, representing about 1.5 billion people. Many of them see flooding year-round, sometimes daily in areas where it used to be sporadic. We will also see droughts, and when they happen, they will be longer and dryer. When storms come, they will be more frequent and stronger. Being able to plan for and respond to the climate crisis is interconnected with every other aspect of resiliency.

Economic Resiliency

Many communities experience the cyclical nature of economics: We go through periods of growth, where we have plenty of commerce and demand for products, and it trickles down into every aspect of life. We also see the downsides. During the Great Recession, for example, we saw the entire world economy dip such that many organizations, including cities, had to let people go and reduce services.

When we look over the last 100 years, we see we do not have a situation where economic growth is continuous without interruption. So how can our communities be resilient against major downturns?

Part of it comes down to the diversity of industries. Economies dependent on one sector are more vulnerable than those that are more diverse because those cities have built an ecosystem that supports lots of different industries.

Innovation is another important part of economic resiliency, ensuring that communities continue to evolve and that there is collaboration between public and private sectors to ensure that investments are made to catalyze economic opportunity.

Governance

Governance applies to the day-to-day management of a city, but it also relates to the structures in place in the event of a crisis. Governance asks questions like: Do we have leadership driving positive and popular change? Do our responding organizations have strong, trained leaders who have the trust of their communities?

We also need to engage with stakeholders— city leaders, academia, private sector, nonprofits, community members, visitors, etc. To what degree does a city engage and create engagement channels for all stakeholders to be involved? Do our communities have strong public-private partnerships that support these types of engagements? This is very core to what we mean by governance.

“RESILIENCY IS A CITY’S ABILITY TO BOUNCE BACK AND RECOVER QUICKLY FROM SHOCKS.”

Bruges, Belgium

Finally, what about data? Is the city making the right data sets accessible to stakeholders? Is there a progressive open data strategy? And if one exists, is it kept current? There are thousands of open data systems worldwide, but some are not maintained, which decreases their value enormously.

Society

How fragile is your city’s infrastructure? Are your bridges protected and strong? Do you have good road systems? Do you have reliable water and energy supplies? Do you have a large homeless population or people who are not getting the medical care they need?

What do your public safety capabilities look like? Do you have a mature, well-integrated police force that works within and across the community? Do you have good emergency services? Focusing on robust public safety capabilities is core to building great cities, and innovative techniques to deliver safety must be considered.

Environment

I mentioned this already in my words about the climate crisis. But let’s go broader: Are the air and water clean? Is the plumbing made from contemporary materials? Does your city have parks and open spaces? By having clean air, water, parks, and other basic needs, we’re building healthier communities.

How good is the electrical grid? Is it carbon-intensive? Are you moving toward noncarbon energy options like solar, wind, and other forms? Is your community supporting or incentivizing migrations to a non-carbon future, where if there are big disruptions to the grid, it can absorb them?

The environment is also about communication. Is there good internet access? If some people have slow or no internet access, it creates digital divides that are quite corrosive and don’t help us become more resilient.

Finally, what does the transportation system look like? Are you providing public transport? Is it clean and efficient? If you have jobs in one area, but there’s no way for people to get to those jobs from the places they live, you have a bigger challenge.

All of these areas need to be baked into how we build our future cities. They can’t be an afterthought. We have to build from the ground up with resiliency in mind. We see some great new ideas around building sustainability into every part of a city, from the materials used to transportation systems, energy, and green spaces and the use of urban forests for better and cleaner air. We need to ensure that all these things are part of the DNA of our urban systems.

We will build many new cities over the next few decades, and we’re going to retrofit our existing cities. I encourage us to think about these dimensions of resiliency as we think about the future of our cities. As you can imagine, our cities aren’t as smart as they can be. So it’s my contention that smart cities are resilient cities. They go hand in hand.

Jonathan Reichental CEO, Human Future

San Francisco, California

Dr. Jonathan Reichental is a multiple award-winning technology and business leader whose career has spanned both the private and public sectors. He’s been a Senior Software Engineering Manager, a Director of Technology Innovation, and served as Chief Information Officer for O’Reilly Media and the City of Palo Alto. Reichental is currently the founder of advisory, investment, and education firm Human Future and also creates online education for LinkedIn Learning. He has written three books on the future of cities: Smart Cities for Dummies, Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids, and Exploring Cities Bedtime Rhymes.