Lessons from local resilience planning in European cities: The case of the Smart Mature Resilience project

Abstract

Urban resilience development at local level requires skills and methodologies that are often not at hand in city administrations. In order to enhance cities’ capacity to resist, absorb and recover from the effects of climate change, the Hprizon2020 project ‘Smart Mature Resilience’ (SMR) is developing standardized approaches and tools to support the development of climate adaptation and resilience strategies. The project has engaged 3 partner cities (Kristiansand, Norway; Glasgow, United Kingdom and Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain) in an iterative, pilot implementation process that presented the tools and trained stakeholders in using them, by discussing how these contribute to the overall resilience building process and how they feed into an integrated management system for resilience planning that can be transferred to the local context of other cities, regions and countries. Developing a co-creation approach has enabled to gather detailed information and understanding on what cities are expecting from this integrated management system for resilience, the so-called European Resilience Management Guideline. All the information gathered has helped cities to highlight existing challenges and associated problems regarding resilience at local level. The following chapter aims initially to present the project and the resilience-building tools it develops and to summarize and comment upon the most important lessons learnt from the pilot implementation process in the three cities.