Smart and Resilient Cities: synergies and mismatching points between the two paradigms

Climate change and energy scarcity are considered the main environmental issues challenging contemporary cities. In the meanwhile, urban development patterns and above all the growth of urban population, which is expected to further increase in the next decades (UN, 2014), are considered the main contributors to the environmental challenges, significantly affecting both the total energy consumptions and the related greenhouse gas emissions (Klein, 2003; Pickett, 2013). Hence, a breakthrough in current urban development patterns is required to counterbalance these challenges. In the last decades numerous metaphors concerned with the future of cities in face of these challenges have been brought into the planners’ language: eco-cities, transition cities, resilient cities, smart cities. This study focuses on two of the most commonly used metaphors (Moir et al., 2014), smart city and resilient city, both of them aimed at improving the capabilities of cities to deal with environmental, social and economic future challenges. Based on a review of existing literature on the two concepts, the research work is addressed to highlight synergies and mismatches as key step for shifting from a “silo” approach - based on the fragmentation of knowledge, strategies and responsibilities (Mitchell, 2005) - towards a systemic one, capable to support cross-sectoral strategies and multi-objective actions for enhancing the capacities of complex urban systems to deal with more and more interconnected challenges.