Strategies for improving Urban Resilience in Europe

Abstract

The European Commission's Joint Research Centre has developed a number of methods and tools that contribute to better resilience of urban regions. Although the tools originally have not been conceived to improve resilience, they can make essential part of a resilience tool suite for national authorities, critical infrastructure owners and other relevant stakeholders. The tools are currently only partly or not connected to each other and the outputs of one cannot be used as input for the other since resilience assessment was not among their primary scope. This is a disadvantage of many available tools world-wide. One of the recommendations for the future is to develop such tools with the scope to fit suitable resilience frameworks that can ensure their connectivity and harmonized interaction. Throughout its history the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission has dedicated a great part of its resources in risk reduction and the improvement of life in European cities. A number of tools and methods have been developed that fall under the umbrella of urban resilience. Although the developers didn't have in mind urban resilience plans originally, these tools and methods, in their whole, constitute important part of the knowledge and evidence that support the investment decisions for more resilience cities. In the next chapters these tools and methods will be presented.