Representatives of eleven European cities and communities as well as scientific experts in the field of resilience as well as the standardisation committees ‘Security and Resilience’ and ‘Sustainable cities and communities’ met in Berlin on 4th April 2017 to discuss resilience in cities and communities with a particular focus on the potential of standardisation to support high-quality management and decision-making at city level as a key element in fostering effective resilience development in cities.
European resilience projects SMR, DARWIN, IMPROVER, RESILIENS, RESOLUTE, Resccue and RESIN convened at this event, as they are working towards similar goals, and could see the benefit in an open discussion of their current state of progess. The day opened with a summary of the current status and progress made so far by each project, keeping in mind potential for collaboration and sharing of results. The presentations showed that the different projects have a variety of focus areas, priorities and methods, while all working towards mutually complementary goals. Smart Mature Resilience and RESIN bring together cities and researchers to investigate and build urban resilience in European cities. While both projects take cities as their particular areas of interest, SMR encompasses the wider spectrum of resilience aspects including social dynamics, while RESIN pinpoints the relevance of climate change adaptation as part of resilience-building.
The RESILENS and IMPROVER projects take critical infrastructures as their main focus, and IMPROVER was of particular interest to the cities present due to the project's plans to develop a game-based training app. Like IMPROVER, RESOLUTE will develop a game-based mobile e-learning tool. Finally, the comprehensive RESCCUE project showed the comprehensive scope of the five-year project and its Hazar tool.
The cities then joined a city-specific workshop while the research projects compared the overlaps between their project outputs so far and the prospects for combining or contributing to one anothers' tools. In the city workshop, cities shared their resilience challenges and examples of good practice and contributed to how they might see standardization supporting their local resilience-building process.
