Empowering urban futures: Key competencies for smart city resilience officers

Abstract

As cities are developing to smart, new systems are utilized that contain a multitude of critical infrastructures. Although these offer major advantages, they are also exposed to new external and frequently uncontrollable factors increasing their risk exposure and enhancing their vulnerability. Therefore, increasing resilience during city development has become a prerequisite for its survival, but continuous resilience improvement led by workforce will help them to prosper. According to researchers, officers should be able to catalogue and prioritize threats and vulnerabilities, but is this only the case? Discrete studies detail and analyze in-depth risks related to smart cities, however, how these risks are addressed by workforce and how these are related to their competencies have not been thoroughly understood to date. If vulnerabilities are not understood and analyzed appropriately by the city workforce and stakeholders, unanticipated consequences and cascading failures may potential occur, even when crises are expected. The objective of this article is to inquire into responsibilities regarding crisis issues concerning the necessary competencies for resilience officers, by exploring current perceptions, expectations and recommendations as these are acknowledged in experts’ opinions and experiences. To do so, a questionnaire was developed and distributed to experts in the field, across various cities in Greece, to indicate responsibilities, and prioritize competencies that resilient officers in smart cities should possess. The findings highlighted significant responsibilities related to managing smart city risks and identified a distinct set of competencies unique to officers in this area, emphasizing the need for targeted efforts to enhance urban resilience through the initiatives led by city officers. This article establishes a clear path for advancing smart city research by highlighting competencies that could be integrated into educational curriculums. These competencies are essential for training a workforce that not only enhances disaster management awareness but also equips cities to handle potential catastrophic events effectively, thereby laying the groundwork for more resilient urban environments.