Overview

Cities must balance ambitious sustainability goals with resilience to climate impacts, embedding resilience thinking across decision-making, leveraging digital tools, and fostering collaboration to enable sustainable urban transformation.

This publication was developed under the “Smart Cities Model Projects” funding programme, financed by the German Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Development, and Building. For more details, please follow the link:

Smart City Dialogue

Approach

Cities and municipalities face a dual challenge: they must pursue ambitious climate protection and sustainability goals for future-proof urban development while managing and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Enhancing urban resilience means not only withstanding stress events but also actively shaping a transformation towards sustainability. This publication seeks to clarify resilience as a framework for sustainable urban development, highlighting its relevance to smart-city strategies. Resilience can be integrated as a standalone element or cross-cutting theme in smart-city approaches, strengthened by features such as feedback loops, modularity, diversity, and redundancy—especially when digital data infrastructures are employed. The study emphasises the importance of addressing the risks of digitalisation in decision-making processes. With examples from various governance levels, it provides recommendations for embedding resilience thinking in municipal practices, promoting resilience across all decision-making processes, aligning resilience strategies with existing plans, fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, recognising digitalisation as an enabler of resilience, investing in resources to bolster resilience, and leveraging resilience to drive sustainable transformation.

Outcomes

The study concludes that embedding resilience as a cross-cutting principle within urban planning and smart-city strategies enhances cities’ capacity to adapt to climate challenges, with recommended actions including integrating resilience into all decision-making, using digital tools to inform processes, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration, and strategically investing in resources to support sustainable transformation.

Publication

Client

German Federal Ministry for Housing, Urban Planning and Building

Publisher

Bundesinstitut für Bau-, Stadt- und Raumforschung (BBSR) im Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung (BBR)

Partner

KWB (project delivered during tenure)

Deutsches Institut für Urbanistik (Difu)

Timeline

2022 - 2023