Smart Cities and Disaster Resilience

Most of the present cities are characterized by low-density urban sprawl, fragile infrastructure, low resilience, and people's poor coping capability to disasters. Further with the increasing unplanned rapid urbanization, the disasters (in terms of frequency and numbers) and their impacts are increasing, which is primarily associated with badly planned and managed urban development, degraded ecosystems, and poverty. According to a study by the United Nations, almost 890 million people (60 %) across the globe live in cities that are at risk from at least one major natural disaster, including floods, droughts, cyclones, or earthquakes. Disasters eventually wipe off years of development and cause death, injury, economic losses, and environmental and urban systems' degradation. Since a city is an integration of complicated urban systems like transportation, water supply, sanitation, housing, and other urban infrastructure and services, strengthening these systems will increase the resilience and help in disaster management in urban areas. On the other hand, smart cities use information and communications technology (ICT) to involve people, improve city services, and enhance urban systems which in turn will improve disaster resilience. To make cities disaster resilient right at the inception stage, the efficiency in urban planning can have a major impact on communities' preparedness and capacities to recover. Smart growth strategies like creating flexible land-use policies, targeting public investment, and engaging the entire community in making decisions can help communities recover from a disaster, rebuild according to a shared community vision, and be better prepared for a disaster. This paper tries to explore through various examples those aspects of smart cities which build and assist in disaster resilience of cities. The study clearly indicates that the relation between smart development and disaster resilience is strong, where the smart growth, smart urbanization (smart grids, eco-cities, compact development), and low-carbon footprint strategies have been used and are some of the most needed consideration to deal with the present scale of disasters in urban areas.