The impact of emerging technologies in supporting urban resilience planning in Canada

Abstract

Climate change, fast population growth, income inequality and political unrest make resilience a priority for every city in the world. Resilience is what will decide whether cities or indeed countries, preserve their quality of life, economic wealth and, in some cases, their political integrity. The aim of this research is to provide a framework to describe best practices in urban resilience within Canada, which can then serve as a guide for those willing to develop such practices in their own cities. There are four objectives of this study: 1) a critical review of technologies that can be used to support resilience, including big data and advanced computing; 2) completion of a pilot study in Canada, which looks into the approaches to resilience in a developed country; 3) polling of three major cities in Canada to determine their best practices for building resilience; and 4) development of a guide to support resilience implementation measures. Two data collection methods were used, primary and secondary research. Secondary research was used to gather information from Canadian and foreign published academic literature. Primary research was performed with data collected from cities of Mississauga and Toronto, Ontario; Calgary, Alberta; and Vancouver, British Columbia. These primary data were analyzed using factor analysis, as the data collected were textual rather than numeric in nature. The main contribution of this research was the development of a framework for resilience containing five main features: cost, training, software, security and big data; with three components under each feature. The framework proposed can be used as the basis for the development of a toolkit for cities, which could help to evaluate how compliant cities are with implementing resilience measures.