Adding Resiliency into Smart City Initiatives

Written September 2020, revised 2026.
Written about smart-city programs, though the argument is really about critical infrastructure anywhere: efficiency and resilience are different design goals, and optimising for the first does not deliver the second.

From the beginning of human civilization, cities have endeavored to change environmental, financial, and social aspects of urban life. Smart cities encompass the transformative spirit of this evolution: from a number of small, discrete initiatives that used technology to improve residents’ lives, smart cities have evolved to a sizable market opportunity that encompasses investments in government transparency, large-scale IoT integration projects, and public safety. With the notion that common frameworks may increase efficiency, promote inter-agency data sharing, and reduce IT spend for common projects tied to smart missions, smart city components have become an essential part of urban critical infrastructure. Smart initiatives notwithstanding, urban areas with high population concentrations remain particularly vulnerable to predictable disasters, including diseases and epidemics, along with earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions, sea-level rise and flooding, food shortages, wildfires, extreme heat, hurricanes, tropical storms and typhoons, terrorist attacks, civil unrest, cyberattacks, war, nuclear or chemical contamination, or extreme air pollution. Additionally, as the COVID-19 crisis has shown, cities are not only vulnerable to loss of life, but also to a loss of economic output and value. To combat these unknowns, cities have focused on emergency management and redundancy. But with integrated technology and AI-driven analytics, a smart city framework should evolve to include discussion on urban resilience.

Smart City Framework

On a global scale, smart cities are the most densely populated areas in the world. With some major city locations being home to more than 10 million people, research shows that they take up more than 60 percent of the world’s energy consumption. In fact, according to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 68 percent of the world’s population will inhabit cities by 2050. Initiatives to make city programs “smarter” are on the rise, and some cities have already begun the intricate process to develop and deploy a framework that supports smart initiatives and help them align with urban strategic objectives. Strategic urban objectives in themselves are often focused on the intractable challenges urban development initiatives commonly face, and smart projects find themselves in unique positions to solve. For instance:

• Urban redesign due to increased populations: More than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, requiring urban planning and redesign to support transportation grids, housing programs for the masses, and rethinking the distribution of freshwater and utilities for an exponentially increasing population.
• Polarized economic growth: The 600 largest global cities will contribute 65 percent of global GDP growth from 2010–2025. However, much of this growth is contingent on a stable, resilient infrastructure that can survive natural or man-made disasters and provide assistance to emergency management.
• An increased focus on green projects: support for sustainable energy initiatives and the decreased greenhouse-gas emissions are forcing cities to develop sustainability strategies for energy generation and distribution, transportation, water management, urban planning, and eco-friendly (design and construction).
• Decreased budgets: Whether the effect of emergent situations, such as the global pandemic, or competing projects, the economic climate continues to place huge budgetary constraints on cities, which are becoming limited in their ability to respond to these pressures or provide financial assurance to new smart projects despite their promise.

These issues, and others, can be mitigated through the adoption of smart, scalable solutions (S3) that take advantage of smart technologies. At its core, a smart city framework is a simple decision methodology that enables both the public and private sectors to plan and implement smart urban initiatives to respond to the above and provide an increase of efficiencies for future projects, reduction of costs for ongoing initiatives, and to full-fill the primary promise of smart cities: to enhance a citizen’s quality of life.

Resilience Framework

In a framework analysis by Dr. Roland Kupers and Song Hsi Ching “A Resilience Framework for Smart Cities,” Kupers and Ching state “The stresses a city faces can be different in nature: they may be chronic or acute, exogenous or endogenous, natural or social, knowable or unknowable. The system can be a bungee cord, someone’s body, a company or a city, etc.”. Smart city initiatives are designed to help monitor and manage the potential for these disasters using innovative technology and the Internet of Things (IoT). They give government and city agencies the ability to better respond to emergencies and plan for long-term growth and sustainability.

Many cities have become acutely aware of the potential for predictable and unpredictable disasters and have taken the steps toward adopting smart city initiatives. Over the last decade, various countries have begun the creation of smart city projects. However, as the IoT and its technology continue to expand, cities and government agencies worldwide are finding a need to create a more resilient smart city infrastructure, and they’re updating many of the technologies currently in place. In fact, some have already appointed chief resilience officers responsible for cross-developmental risk assessment, organization of readiness and preparedness, and putting in place technology-enabled manual and automated response management.

The technology behind smart cities and IoT is critical for any preparation against the unexpected, so updates and improvements are necessary whenever possible. Major areas like Kansas City, Missouri, and Las Vegas, Nevada, are implementing multiple-phase updates to improve their more dated technologies. Kansas City, for example, launched its smart cities plan back in 2016. The plan consisted of various phases that would update the city’s Wi-Fi access points and over 600 traffic sensors over a nine-mile long span. In Las Vegas, smart city improvements focus on public safety and transportation, utilizing high-definition video cameras, sound and motion sensors, and other IoT devices.

These updates and improvements are essential for sustainable smart city infrastructure and aren’t limited to only public safety and transportation. Processes to leverage robotics for the delivery of goods and transportation, liberating additional capacity for housing, mobility, and freight during emergencies, building automated and flexible production lines and supply chains, and massively deploying online and remote capabilities for education, healthcare, business, and entertainment are also other ways to improve resilience in smart cities, and will go a long way in being better prepared for disasters.

A Layered Response to Resilience

Most cities establish resilience criteria in an intuitive way rather than as a clearly structured component in an established framework. A structured method to include resilience allows for overlapping efficiencies in smart infrastructure, but also provides transparencies into the “why’s” and “how” smart cities use citizen data. As city leaders define actions or initiatives by their impact on stated city objectives, it may be helpful to look at adding resiliency in four layers congruent to the intractable challenges we mentioned previously. Additionally, a four-layer framework provides a logical flow that enables stakeholders to “test” initiatives for proof of value while engaging in a feedback loop that enables stakeholders to deploy best practices, thus aligning urban objectives with potential smart projects.

• Layer 1: Aligning resiliency to city core objectives that help to improve social, environmental, and economic growth. This layer hardens core smart technology associated with transportation grids, water, and utility providers. It is important to note that most Smart City initiatives manifest themselves in a city’s physical infrastructure (transportation grids, electric power stations, etc.). This layer affords smart framework the details associated with the physical components of a smart city technology and the physical locations where it is deployed — utilities, transportation, and common public services.
• Layer 2: Aligning resiliency to support economic growth for comparative smart technology. Outside of existing, “city indicators,” which measure and benchmark smart initiatives using defined and specific methodologies used for supporting economic growth, smart projects need to have resiliency factored in to support initiatives during a time of crises or emergent scenarios. As the population in a smart city grows, this layer ensures support for the formation of thoughtful solutions to technology projects which support economic systems, which in turn will be able to withstand the test of external threats.
• Layer 3: Aligning resiliency to smart projects that support Global City Indicators Facility (GCIF), Mercer Quality of Living Survey, and Green City Indexes (GCI). Resiliency objectives can actually assist Smart Frameworks by providing connection points and a common focus on what can be seen as different quantitative and qualitative approaches.
• Layer 4: Aligning resiliency to mapped objectives and including them in best practices and policy. This layer encompasses the “how” — how resiliency objectives are implemented in every facet of smart plans. It links all the layers as it provides overlapping information and enables the identification of data relevant to core city objectives.

A Resilient Global Supply Chain

Many smart city initiatives are reliant on global supply chain, IoT suppliers, and IT contractors. As emergencies start to affect urban development, some of the hardest-hit areas are manufacturing and global supply chain. Smart city frameworks must be able to account for the slowdown or potential shut-down of global trade activity for IoT hardware, or technological components that make up the backbone of smart technologies.

Additionally, reliance on foreign markets such as China may see some of the greatest impact due to reduced manufacturing of IoT devices in case of a global emergency (such as we say with the global pandemic), or security issues or strict advisories provided by the Federal government. Near term, China will see some of the greatest impact due to reduced manufacturing of IoT devices because China has the largest IoT device shipments and connections today. Additionally, the supply of products in markets such as China may be even more reduced as these markets may be “…the recipients of a “one-two” punch led by the trade war for Chinese IoT suppliers as companies reassess their supply chains and dependence on Chinese products” (ABI Research). For many cities, supply chain assessments have already been in motion due to the trade war. But now is a good time to formalize those assessments and establish alternatives in various IoT markets, either for the potential supply slowdowns or shutdowns due to reduced shipping volumes or trade wars or Federal policies associated with technology supplied by foreign vendors.

What we built from this. Critical infrastructure is one of the threat vectors DeepWatch covers, alongside health, thermal, natural disaster, severe weather, terrorism, cyber, transportation and public sentiment — and it is built to keep running at forward and disaster-impaired sites, reconciling when the link returns. Resilience is not a feature added afterwards. Situational Awareness.

An earlier version of this essay was published on Medium in September 2020. This version has been revised.