Urban resilience and sustainable development policies: An analysis of smart cities in the state of Sao Paulo.
| Autor | da Silva, Cristiane Aparecida |
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Introduction
Urbanization has transformed the planet from 10 percent urban in 1990 to over 50 percent urban in just two decades (UNDESA, 2010). Although the urban areas (at least 50,000 inhabitants) cover less than 3 percent of the global surface, they account for 71 percent of global emissions of carbon (IPCC, 2014) and consume 80 percent of the world's resources (Arbolino, Carlucci, Cira, Yigitcanlar, & Ioppolo, 2018).
In this scenario, the strong dependence on non-renewable resources increases the levels of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including a large amount of carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]), an element that accounts for global warming. As cities continue to grow, coping with uncertainties and challenges, such as climate changes, has become imperative, and urban resilience has become a widely discussed concept (Leichenko, 2011).
In this regard, there are two main ways to respond to climate changes: GHG mitigation and adaptation. While mitigation focuses on the source of climate change, adaptation deals with its consequences, and it should be noted herein that that the term adaptation was brought to the attention of the scholar community by United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, as agreed in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Schipper & Burton, 2009).
According to Rizzi, Graziano, and Dallara (2018), sustainable urban development, taken as the future ability of local systems to support human well-being, is closely associated with resilience. In this context, cities play a major role in the fight of climate changes and in the implementation of new, smart technologies, and such actions have been seen as key factors for the reduction of GHG emissions and for the improvement of energy efficiency in the cities. Such technologies must be smart, lean, integrated, economic and efficient in resources, with impacts not only on the environmental and financial sustainability goals but on the citizens' well-being too (Ahvenniemi, Huovila, Pinto-Seppa, & Airaksinen, 2017).
Ahvenniemi, Huovila, Pinto-Seppa, and Airaksinen (2017) consider that the increasing interest on the concept of smart cities and the need to cope with urbanization-related challenges resulted in diverse public and private investments on technology development and implementation. This can be seen in the large number of initiatives of smart cities, projects of city build out, i.e., city development plans, and co-financed public research projects. In this regard, smart cities have set big goals for a clean future, participating in actions and city networks such as the Covenant of Mayors, the Civitas Initiative, the Concerto and the Green Digital Charter (Ahvenniemi et al., 2017).
Since 2009, the concept of smart city has been understood as the objective of any city, irrespective of its size, and since then it has expanded globally (Marsal-Llacuna, Colomer-Llinas, & Melendez-Frigola, 2015). The initiative was developed based on previous experiences of measuring environmentally friendly, livable cities, considering the concepts of sustainability and quality of life, with an important and significant addition of technological and informational components. In 2013, in Brazil, with the purpose of leading actions and goals throughout the country, the Rede Brasileira de Cidades Inteligentes e Humanas (Brazilian Network of Human Smart Cities) was created, which is shared by 350 of the Brazilian biggest cities (RBCIH, 2018).
These goals, according to Ahvenniemi et al. (2017), are sustainable urban development policies designed to support energy efficiency and reduce C[O.sub.2] emissions, which are the same goals set by the European Union for 2030. According to these authors, these policies are necessary to assist decision makers in moving toward the desired direction and deploy such policies at the operational level, and assess the progress of the cities in the pursuit of the desired goals.
From the view of the European Union (2011), the concept of smart cities supports the idea of environmental sustainability, whose main goal is to reduce GHG emissions in urban areas using innovative technologies. According to Rizzi et al. (2018), sustainability aspires to a persistent, equitable long-term well-being, which is summarized into the resilience dimensions.
Given the above and aiming to investigate urban resilience, herein defined as the cities' ability to respond to or use a negative event as an opportunity for change and development (Graziano & Rizzi, 2016) as well as the sustainable development policies of smart cities, the following research question is proposed:
RQ1. Which is the urban resilience capacity and its relationship with economic, social and environmental well-being in smart cities in the state of Sao Paulo (SP)?
Thus, the aim of this study is to investigate the urban resilience capacity and its relations with economic, social and environmental well-being in smart cities in SP, after the global crisis in 2008.
This study is based on the justification that the impact of shocks and stresses that affect the development of systems is responsible for the growth of urban areas and urban population. The OECD (2016) ranked these tensions in various groups: industrial structural change, e.g., the relocation or closure of the main businesses in a city; economic crises, such as the 2008 financial crisis and the sovereign debt crises that have impacted the European Union since 2009. The responses of the cities depend on characteristics such as the structure of their economy, proximity to capital (OECD, 2014) and internationalization of the local economy.
In the cited context, Rizzi et al. (2018) emphasize that the number of people entering or leaving a city or town has an influence on the employment rate, taxable income and on the demand for public services. In addition, migration has a great impact on the society and economy, and social integrations have been a major challenge for local cities, considering that violence, crime, terrorism may represent critical shocks for the city. Likewise, natural disasters have a critical impact not only on the environment but on the economy and society of the urban system as well. Changes in leadership and any policy discontinuance are other stressors, which may affect the economic basis of a city and its social structure. Thus, any kind of shock in complex systems, such as the urban system, has economic, social, environmental and institutional repercussions (Rizzi, Graziano, & Dallara, 2018).
In this sense, an evaluation of the pillars of urban resilience and its relationship with human well-being and a consideration of the economic, social and environmental components may help provide a structured basis to foster the development of public policies and the support of practical decision making, making this research relevant.
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Theoretical framework
2.1 Urban resilience
The etymological roots of resilience are in the Latin word resilio, which means to recover (Klein, Nicholls, & Thomalla, 2003). The meaning of resilience is malleable, allowing that the interested parties join around a common terminology without requiring them to necessarily agree on an exact definition (Brand & Jax, 2007). Such imprecision can make resilience difficult to operationalize or to develop indicators or general metrics (Pizzo, 2015).
The notion of resilience was first developed in the materials sciences, since materials have the physical property of returning to its original form or position after a deformation that does not exceed its elastic limits. From this meaning, the term has been used in different disciplines, but the first studies addressing the topic of resilience were related to research on environmental phenomena (Rizzi et al., 2018).
The term resilience became popular with Holling (1973) and is defined as the capacity to adapt to shocks, reduce vulnerability and resist to adverse changes. According to its Latin root, resilience is the ability to leap back or rebound, the ability of an entity or system to recover its original form and position elastically after a disturbance or disruption of some kind (Simmie & Martin, 2010). Therefore, the wide use of the term in regional or urban applications refers to the idea of the ability of a local socioeconomic system to recover from a shock or disruption (Simmie & Martin, 2010).
To Leichenko (2011), urban resilience is generally linked to the capacity of a city or urban system to withstand a wide range of shocks and stresses, such as climate change.
According to Meerow, Newell, and Stults (2016), urban resilience refers to the capacity of a urban system and all its socio-ecological and socio-technical networks constituent of temporal and spatial scales to maintain or return quickly to the desired functions in the face of disturbance, to adapt to the change and rapidly transform any system that limits the current or future adaptive capacity. To Graziano and Rizzi (2016), urban resilience offers interesting views about the analysis of the cities capacities in responding to or using an adverse event as an opportunity for change and development.
There is a strong link between resilience and sustainability: sustainability captures the aspiration for persistent and equitable well-being in the long term, which is summarized in the resilience ability to persist and ability to adapt (Rizzi et al., 2018). Sustainable development aims to create and maintain social, economic and ecological systems prospering from a co-evolutionary point of view. Both sustainability and resilience recognize the need for preventive measures for the use of resources and in relation to emerging risks, aiming to promote the integrity of future well-being (Rizzi et al., 2018).
In this context, Dube and Polese (2016) evaluated the resilience of 83 Canadian regions using four metrics: population, employment, unemployment and employment rates. The results pointed to regional economies are generally responsive...
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