Managing Urban Resilience

Abstract

Good governance is necessary to make cities resilient and sustainable. To achieve this, we propose the Responsive City, in which citizens, enabled by technology, take on an active role in urban planning processes. Adequate planning of Responsive Cities requires a change and evolvement of the role of policy-makers, government experts, urban planners, and architects. A key factor is hereby the understanding of urban dynamics. In this paper we present a method to model the dynamics of the city from the viewpoint of the urban metabolism as a system of stocks and flows. Understanding these flows helps to identify the main characteristics of the city and advances the knowledge of relationships between different stocks and flows in the system. Big Data can inform and support this process with evidence by taking advantage of behavioural data from infrastructure sensors and crowdsourcing initiatives. They can be overlaid with spatial information in order to respond to events in decreasing time spans by automating the response process partially, which is a necessity for any resilient city management.