Why is the RESCCUE Project Disruptive? Synergies between Industry and City

In Greek mythology, Zeus asked his son Prometheus to create the human being. However, he spent so much time creating its masterpiece that he realized he had used all gifts Zeus had given to him, but that the human beings were intelligent but still harmless. Prometheus felt bad, stole Gods’ fire and some tools from the Olympus and gave them to the humans to help them protecting from the climate and the hazards of the Earth. Zeus, enraged by the theft, chained and tortured Prometheus in the Caucasus, and humiliated its human beings and their cities in the Earth by sending Pandora with its box containing all the evils of the world. The human beings opened the box and its awful content spread over the Earth. Since then, human beings have needed to be resilient. 

Human beings live in community, and illnesses, wars, droughts or floods, hurricanes, famine and other misfortunes from the Pandora’s box affect globally, but have different impact to individuals according their social scale. One of the worst punishments that we are suffering now is the irreversible climate change, accelerated by a mankind living in an overpopulated bad managed Earth.

Like Prometheus, the RESCCUE project is “stealing” ideas and tools from industry to help smart helpless cities. Cities are learning from industry and in RESCCUE we are providing them with tools to access to the industrial concepts linked to Safety, Security and Business Continuity. These concepts are cross-cutting and bound by the Management, which ensures the cross-cutting approach. We are providing resilience.

A resilient urban system is able to be prepared, withstand, answer, recover and learn from any crisis situation. The urban system works like an industrial system, i.e. it has to be resilient and guarantee security, safety and business continuity in case of incident in accordance with the law and the service contracts.

RESCCUE applies a disruptive model to manage climate-related impacts taking the resilience approach. The HAZUR tool, which is in the core of the RESCCUE project, integrates business continuity with safety and security thanks to resilience, that has been adopted as the backbone concept.

RESCCUE will create a system to help making decisions by synthetizing in a simple scheme a complex system. And this will help the city practitioners to have a holistic approach. Organizing, giving meaning and visualizing information will provide more intelligence to respond, recover efficiently and be reinforced after an urban stress.