Resilience, Smartness and sustainability. Towards a new paradigm?

Abstract

The urbanization and the vulnerability of a city make challenging the ability of remaining along a sustainable development path. From a sustainability point of view, the smartness concept has been enlarged up to incorporate the definition of sustainable development with the so-called smart and sustainable cities. Another aspect is gaining importance in this debate: the growing challenges posed by climate change and by environmental issue at large. This issue has forced governments and in particular cities, which represent the main place for the prevention and the implementation of initiatives against negative environmental events, to develop flexible and resilient actions, initiatives and plans. In the near future, the majority of the population will be establishing in cities or urban context, so that the active actions will be based on the need to adopt solutions that address the principle of resilience. Since policies, plans and projects should succeed in considering together these three principles – sustainability, smartness and resilience – the aim of this paper consists in analyzing the common features of these concepts which may be at the basis of an integrated approach. Adapting the definition already accepted for buildings in terms of bright buildings, the relevance of brightness issue consists in developing a new paradigm of reference for a city.