An Analytical review on the theory of smart resilient city and its applicability

Due to the rapid urbanization, urban planning is faced with increasingly complex problems. One such overwhelming issue is urban resilience that has created challenges both for the planners and city managers. Technologies such as IoT, Big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence etc., however, have provided new opportunities to facilitate urban planning efforts. Hence, the smart cities concept, as an innovative mix of technologies and social structure, can be seen as a solution toward making cities more livable. The technologies used in this arena provide open, massive, diverse and accessible data that can be analyzed by reliable and real-time methods to support better planning and decision-making. In this regard, many researchers have found interest in “smart resilience city (SRC)”. This paper is a systematic literature review of such studies in order to provide a new theoretical frame for SRC planning. Here, we have analyzed the mechanism of smart resilience city and its relation with smart city and urban resilience. A sample of 42 related research documents, which were published in 2010-2020, are selected for our study. In the literature, SRC attempts to connect the smart cities concept with resilience: a) to understand the major steps of creating a smart city: design and planning, modelling and simulation, implementation, technology management and evaluation; and b) to contribute to the urban resilience methods such as computational, non-computational, evaluation-based and recovery methods and their applicability in pre-, during, and post-disaster situations. The literature review showed that 35 percent of the research covered design and planning of smart city themes and nearly 75 percent discussed the non-computational methods of urban resilience. Also, they are mainly focused on proactive methods. Our review has uncovered the inadequacy of studies in both smart cities concept and urban resilience. Planning a smart resilience city entails both substance and procedure. “substance” consists of the hard dimension (technology, resources and procedures) and the soft dimension (people, institutions and activities). Moreover, it is revealed that the substance of SRC is formed based on 13 common characteristics: Awareness, Networking, modularity, redundancy, innovation, creativity, learning and predictability, participation, flexibility, collaboration, adaptability, efficiency and diversity. The “procedure” of SRC deals with three major approaches, including the general, thematic and local ones. The general approach explains the frameworks of SRC or a process to achieve it. The thematic approach contains different methods and technologies to ascertain part of SRC. The Local approach concentrates on evaluating and lesson learned from the practical cases around the world. It is proved that the procedural approach is highly related to the expertise of researchers. In conclusion, to plan for SRC, we ask the following questions: (a) How is the plan of SRC related to the steps of creating a smart city?; (b) How is it related to the states of resiliency?; (c) Which methods of resiliency are used in the SRC planning process?; and (d) What are the basic characteristics of the new SRC plan. Finally, the procedure should be designed by a multidisciplinary group based on the redefined content.