About
The project
Smart Urban Resilience was a collaborative research project led by researchers at the Universities of Durham and Newcastle in the United Kingdom and CIDE and UAGro in Mexico.
The project focused on the intersection between smart urbanism practices, digital technologies, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and emergency response. We examined the relations between the smart city and associated technologies and citizen action in planning for and responding to disasters and emergencies. Recognising that the potential of smart urban technologies for contributing to DRR remains untested, the project explored whether and how smart city initiatives and technologies might lead to more effective and socially inclusive responses to disasters.
Empirically we focused on three medium-sized cities: Querétaro, Puebla and Acapulco. Medium cities are home to the majority of the world’s urban population yet poorly understood—and where urban sprawl, poor planning, and rapid demographic growth increase the scale of the challenges associated with disaster management, prevention and response. In Mexico, urban areas are likely to experience more frequent and extreme weather events, given their broad diversity of geomorphological and hydro-meteorological conditions as well as due to ongoing climate change.
We are conscious that building urban resilience requires not only hard effective and efficient infrastructure and technological advances, but also capable and functioning ‘soft infrastructure’ including social networks and institutional capacity and coordination. With that in mind, our project recognizes, seeks to capitalize on, and find ways to strengthen the already significant role that civil society has historically played in DRR and emergency response in Mexico, through examining pathways for smart city approaches towards DRR and emergency response. In doing so, the project sought to consider the specificity of the Mexican city, its civil society, and how these might shape their encounters with smart urban and digital technologies.
Work Packages
The project was composed of five work packages (WPs). These range from theoretical analyses of DRR, emergency response and digital and smart urban technologies, to the design and development of stakeholder engagement plans, strategies and practices. Please visit the ‘outputs’ page to access the Working Papers produced by each WP. To learn more about the WPs and their research leads and teams, please use the menu on top of the page.