CRISIS

Description

Covid-19 epidemic has created new challenges for the development of smart and sustainable cities. It has proven that it is not anymore sufficient just to focus on providing services for quality of life, or for a better business ecosystem. We need to prepare cities so that they can manage, adapt, maintain and ensure city services and enhance the quality of life in the face of hazards, shocks, and stresses. According to this definition, resilience not only includes earthquakes, fires, floods, etc. but also anything that disrupts the operation of a city either occasionally or periodically. Examples include high unemployment; endemic violence; health epidemics and chronic food and water shortages. To create and operate smart and resilient cities, new competences (knowledge, skills, and attitudes) must be developed and new curriculums for new job profiles should be defined. Smart City Resilience Officer (SCRO) is an innovative position in a smart city acting as the city’s central person for planning and building smart city’s resilience capacity. The project aligns itself with the European policies in force, with the general objective of contributing to the development of digital skills for smart cities and, at the same time, the resilience of cities.

Since urban resilience is a multifaceted concept that spreads in many dimensions such as social, environmental, economical and infrastructural, a SCRO should have an integrated view of all potential hazards prioritizing the most important ones for a city. This highlights the very dynamic and highly transversal nature of this job role. On top of that, traditional resilience approaches and tools intersect with new opportunities offered by smart cities. Therefore, additional knowledge and skills are required from SCROs to examine and incorporate digital urban infrastructures, smart and autonomous devices and artificial intelligence, among others, into novel resilience schemes and implementations. While not many cities around the world have such employees, the need for trained professionals to undertake this job role is urgent. Moreover, lack of studies to determine the required competences of SCROs, as well as the lack of relevant educational programs means that the CRISIS project will shed light on a pressing yet still unaddressed issue of establishing quality curricula to provide prospective SCROs with the necessary skill set for successfully fulfilling their role.

This project mainly focuses on improving digital, transferrable, resilience and smart city-related competences of people interested in seeking job opportunities and careers as SCROs. The need for such trained personnel will grow rapidly in the next few years as more and more cities are becoming digitalized and interconnected.