Technological Innovations for Enhancing Disaster Resilience in Smart Cities: A Comprehensive Urban Scholar’s Analysis

Abstract

Despite advancements, Smart Cities encounter hazards. Smart Cities’ higher reliance on interconnected systems and networks makes them susceptible to risks beyond conventional ones, leading to cascading effects. Hence, the effective use of technological innovations is vital. This effective use involves understanding the existing use of technology innovations for resilience making in Smart Cities and the wise utilisation of them as suitable for different contexts. However, there is a research gap for a fundamental study that synthesises the emerging and disruptive technologies that are being used to improve the disaster resilience in Smart Cities and how they can be classified. Therefore, this research aimed to address that need, so that a Smart City evaluating the technologies/tools for disaster resilience could wisely utilise the available resources and prioritise the most suitable for their context-specific needs. Following a comprehensive literature review, the study identified 24 technologies and/or tools for creating, sustaining, and enhancing the resilience within Smart Cities. In doing so, they should collect and manage citywide geodata and foster public participation. While the wise utilisation of the most suitable and feasible tools and technologies is a measure of smartness in a Smart City, the findings suggested four key factors with which these technologies could be assessed. These four factors included impact on society, the adoption speed by Smart Cities, the maturity of the technology, and the capabilities offered to the community.

Reliability and Detectability of Emergency Management Systems in Smart Cities under Common Cause Failures

“…For example, a novel EMS architecture has been proposed, integrating heterogeneous sensor networks and addressing data fusion techniques to enhance situational awareness and decision-making in emergency scenarios [21][22][23]. Another important perspective of EMSs is their distributed implementation, leveraging advanced communication technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, into the EMS infrastructure to improve responsiveness and scalability [16,24,25].…”

Flood-Resilient Smart Cities: A Data-Driven Risk Assessment Approach Based on Geographical Risks and Emergency Response Infrastructure

“…Emergency management in smart cities has been studied as a research topic for some years, with several researchers developing methodologies and mathematical models to detect, provide alert about, and mitigate emergency events [20,21]. When performing such services, the concept of "urban risk to emergency" is typically associated with the potential threats and vulnerabilities that cities and densely populated areas face regarding the occurrence of emergencies or disasters.…”

Exploring Citizens’ Adoption of Sustainable Innovations Implemented by Cities and Municipalities in Germany

“…Since the UN created the 17 SDGs in 2015, governments, cities, companies, individuals, and many more are attempting to meet them by 2030. Companies are trying to make their processes and products progressively more sustainable and efficient; there are, for example, energy labels for products on a scale from A to G, which indicate how energetically good or bad the product is (energy consumption, water consumption, noise, etc., are included in the calculation), or digital processes are introduced to reduce the amount of paper and eliminate redundancies, or sustainable innovations are launched to be prepared for future crises [22,23]. The three pillars of sustainability (economic, social, and environmental) should always be addressed [24].…”