Smart Cities and Urban Resilience: Insights from a Delphi Survey

Cities worldwide are exposed to an expansive range of climate-related disasters, and thus, enhancing urban resilience is increasingly critical and has become a major goal of city authorities. With the rapid development of technology, the concept of a “smart city” is also becoming popular. A vast body of research has been published on urban resilience as well as smart city. There are also many tools and indicator sets for their assessment. However, there have been limited efforts to synchronously study these two concepts. Urban resilience and smart city have the potential to be merged, which is what this research calls “smart city resilience” and implies deploying “smart solutions” for urban resilience and sustainable city management. However, this trend is still in its infancy worldwide, and further exploration is needed. Additionally, assessment methods and approaches, such as a toolkit for assessing the current situation and making cross-city comparisons, also need to be developed. Hence, the purpose of this research was to investigate the indicators that should be included in an assessment toolkit. A panel of 13 experts participated in the Delphi survey, and the analytic hierarchy process was used to find the relative weight of each indicator. Finally, the opinions toward the assessment toolkit from the experts were discussed further. Results can inform future efforts toward developing toolkits for assessing smart city resilience.