Digital Resilience

What is digital resilience?

Urban development that is both smart and sustainable is intrinsically linked to digital innovation in city management. Cities continuously launch new digital services and smart solutions in order to become more resilient, efficient, and attractive. They invest in digital technologies to help monitor the environment, enhance mobility, and improve the delivery of municipal services. The increasing use of digital technologies offers immense opportunities if well governed but also causes serious concerns because of an emerging digital divide when it comes to the goal of making cities accessible and inclusive for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.

Digital inclusion has become a core part of resilience in recent years; the way we interface with social services, infrastructure and transport increasingly takes place digitally. Its potential to integrate, amplify and innovate diverse public and social services has become key to cities’ well-being. However, digital inclusion strategies need to bolster current efforts to reduce socio-economic inequities.

Digitalization has taken a leap forward due to the Covid-19 pandemic, as people have changed the way they access services, interact, and navigate spaces. From a resilience perspective, protecting critical infrastructure from cybersecurity threats and power outages will gain in importance as urban systems are becoming increasingly interconnected. In addition, sensitive data needs to be safeguarded to prevent theft, unauthorized access or inappropriate use thereof. With the amount of data increasing exponentially, however, preserving individual privacy has become another major challenge in the era of Big Data.

Digitalization is key to accelerating the green transition and climate-ready infrastructure development. To maximize the contribution of digitalization to urban resilience, equity should be at the front and center of digital strategies. On the other hand, digitalization means that cities must adapt their resilience strategy to match their evolving risk profile otherwise they risk building a smarter but more fragile and unequal city.

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