The role and the place of technology in improving the resilience of cities.

Abstract

This master thesis aims at studying, describing and overviewing the place and the role of technology in the improvement of resilience in the cities. This topic is of growing interest when we see that our societies are evolving in a world where technology is adopted in every aspect of our lives. To do so, a literature review has been carried out to discuss resilience when this concept is applied to city, to debate the differences with the concept of sustainability and finally to present the technologies often mentioned in the literature about resilience in cities. After that, we reviewed and embraced several public management theories considering that the cities should adopt strategies to act in the best possible way, and that a strategy fits a particular and unique paradigm inherent to the city to which it will be employed. Next, a quantitative analysis was performed to establish the panorama of technologies used by local governments that decided to improve their resilience. We saw that the latter are mainly using ICTs and IoTs to lead their actions and that they could adopt new types of technologies in the future. Finally, we compared three specific case studies that have put into place a digital solution to solve a problem of resilience in their region. There, we acknowledged the fact that they were often using several complementary technologies to carry out their mission, and that the digital aspect of their solution is of predominant importance.