Making smart cities resilient harmonising technologies and human-centricity

Recent crises have underscored the need for smart cities to evolve, better complementing their technological infrastructure with social, cultural, and environmental dimensions to stay resilient over time. The literature calls for further research into the essentials of smart cities towards a more participatory, human-centered approach that can collaboratively enhance the diverse aspects of urban resilience. This comprehensive approach enables cities to leverage various resources to absorb, adapt, transform, respond, and continue functioning in the face of disturbances. This paper seeks to contribute to the fragmented research on smart city resilience by examining the core multidimensional components of urban resilience and identifying the key actions that these cities undertake to achieve it. Following a preliminary theoretical framework, a comparative case study analysis of six European smart cities was conducted. The findings offer valuable insights for both theory and practice, providing scholars, policymakers, and public managers with guidance for conceptualising, developing, and implementing effective resilience-based policies and strategies. However, this study is somewhat limited by the relatively small sample size of the analyzed case cities and by the qualitative design of the content analysis, in which the semantic approach implies a certain influence of researchers’ interpretation on the coding process.