4 WAYS THE NEW HAZUR CAN HELP RESILIENT CITIES

Some innovations change the lens through which we see the world. In the world of cities, when dealing with urban resilience, we need innovations able to change how city managers (and citizens, of course) think their municipalities should be managed. At a time when hazards, both “natural” or technological, cost many lives and billions of dollars, effects of climate change, urban growth, the technological complexity of territories and the vulnerability of critical infrastructures bring out the need to innovate with new methodologies and tools to make this shift on the way we manage city services facing disruptions.

In the last 3 years, RESCCUE has been working to bring tools to the market of cities to cope with climate change focusing on water. Taking into account detailed studies developed in RESCCUE, HAZUR integrates now capacity building, a method to interconnect city services, guidance to create Resilience Action Plans and a useful dashboard based on a transversal vision of city services to complement “tactical” or “situation rooms” from control centres (facilities that bring together city’s critical support services to manage the event of a major emergency in city). HAZUR is thus a method and a tool enabling thinking and decision making based on a holistic and resilience vision of the city that can help cities in 4 ways:

1.    Creating a purpose and preparing the city stakeholders to understand risks and resilience thinking

City leaders’ (political) commitment is crucial to define the scope and goals of a project and to identify key urban services, infrastructures and city players. Strategic objectives determine also the granularity of the project (which detail of analysis is needed). And key players decide the project framework, using standards or keeping coherence with local regulations. A common language and shared vision on resilience are essential for the success of the project. The tool proposes also training to HAZUR experts and city players thus creating an online HAZUR Community to obtain the necessary holistic vision.

2.    Providing technical analysis in a Resilience Assessment based on interconnections among services

Once the city is prepared for the assessment, HAZUR combines outputs from workshops or expertise knowledge, supported by detailed models when available, with other outputs automatically calculated. At this stage of the HAZUR implementation, experts and players use different functionalities to understand how the city responds when hazards create disrupting events. This analysis is possible thanks to a participatory process with expert players registered in the platform. This process allows for exploring cascading effects, which helps to identify performance indicators and identifying improvement areas of city services to be included in the Resilience Action Plan. Additionally, the new tool includes the capacity to think about how climate variables affect the response of urban services to direct impacts and how different strategies can improve this response.

3.    Creating a decision support system based on a global simulation of cascading effects when an impact strikes

Finally, as each block in HAZUR is fed by the information from previous blocks, the platform turns into an engine to make the best decisions to improve city resilience before and after an impact strikes with a real holistic vision breaking the silos in cities. The “Resilience Monitor“ fed with selected online data (which includes key indicators), the “Simulation Catalogue” and the community know-how sharing converge into a “Decision Support Centre” (DSC). The platform is therefore ready to support operators training, operations planning and control, metrics, indicators and frameworks follow-up, and new investments analysis. The previous assessment can then be regularly reviewed according to management feedback. Cities having control centres with associated tactical or situation rooms can benefit from this vision by interrelating key data from the available repositories, i.e. traffic, community safety, or incident management. For small, medium, and developing cities, the use of the DSC can bring value even without advanced control centres in place.

4.    Supporting new business models creation to build a market of city resilience providers

The tool has been designed to be easily scalable and replicable with a SaaS model since the process is supported by trained HAZUR experts, professionals that provide technical support to cities during the HAZUR process. The tool allows a sustainable business model for these experts and organizations as they can provide services to cities with the guidance of the tool. And it is ready to be implemented if city leaders (politicians) invest local budget in resilience because it will pay off the high cost of non-resilience, as it happens with energy efficiency. Cities and organizations providing services to them need also to feel comfortable paying for an external SaaS tool and/or for a resilience service externalization, as they do in other city management issues since other resilience models are still not ready to be implemented.

At this stage, we can confirm that HAZUR method and tool is one of the results that, along with other project outputs, can be scaled and replicated in other cities. However, to do so, we need new business models and a target market ready to economically sustain tools and methods outside of research. RESCCUE consortium is formed by different types of organizations (public, private, research, SMEs…) working in such a way and can be, therefore, a powerful example of European collaboration to bring resilience to cities and territories in a sustainable way.