Do Smart Cities Represent the Key to Urban Resilience? Rethinking Urban Resilience

Abstract

The pandemic disrupted all activities, so it became necessary to understand, but also rethink, the complexity of economic resilience to better deal with future shocks. A component that can signal the resilience potential of a socio-economic system is smart city response, using technology to make services more efficient. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between smart cities and urban resilience to determine whether urban resilience is significantly influenced by urban smartness. Given the EU SDGs Strategy and the Implementation of RRF Programs, we have also identified the main driving forces that can amplify the impact of smart city development policies on local resilience. The results highlighted that at the European level, smart cities are significantly correlated with urban resilience; urban resilience is explained by the variation in urban smartness; resilience is correlated with all smart city dimensions, highly in (post-)pandemic, redefining a “new normal” in resilience approaches for smart cities. We also stressed the emerging, more complex content of the economic resilience concept and the new structural approach of smart cities resilience for the post-COVID-19 period.