News

7 March 2017

San Sebastian mayor hails cities as the ideal scale for developing resilience

Eneko Goia, Mayor of San Sebastian, Basque Country, welcomed the Smart Mature Resilience project to San Sebastian City Hall on 6 March 2017, emphasising that “cities are the ideal scale for working on resilience”. Resilience-building is crucial to San Sebastian, as the coastal city is already experiencing the consequences of climate change, particularly flooding. As the mayor joked: “The sea wants to recover all of those places we took in the past!” The project is developing a new Resilience Management Guideline, which helps cities to make the right decisions and implement policies to build resilience. The guideline is designed to be useable by all European and global cities. Resilient cities support one another and bolster each other’s ability to recover from shocks and stresses.

“We are building the boat and sailing,” said project coordinator Jose Mari Sarriegi, Tecnun, University of Navarra. The project partners, scientists and cities of San Sebastian, Glasgow (UK), Kristiansand (Norway), Bristol (UK), Vejle (Denmark), Rome (Italy) and Riga (Lativa) are collaborating closely to develop the project tools. Two of the tools are now available for use by cities: the Resilience Maturity Model and the Resilience Information Portal. A Risk Systemicity Questionnaire has been developed and tested in cooperation with the project cities, which will be launched in the coming months.

The final two tools, the Resilience Policies Portfolio and the System Dynamics Model, are under development. The System Dynamics Model is a game-style simulation programme that allows users to explore the effectiveness of implementing different resilience policies, helping to show which kinds of policies should be implemented in which order as the ideal trajectory towards a resilient city. The project partners and stakeholders tested the model during the San Sebastian meeting, providing developers with feedback to integrate into the final version of the tool.

For more information, visit www.smr-project.eu.