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H. Kramar, F. Strohmayer:
"Are Smart Cities more resilient to economic crises? An empirical evidence of economic development in selected European medium-sized cities";
Vortrag: 56th European Regional Science Association Congress 2016, Wien; 23.08.2016 - 26.08.2016.

The "European Smart City Model" (Giffinger et al. 2007) profiles and benchmarks selected European medium-sized cities according to their "smartness" in 6 different categories. The data-based evaluation of relevant local conditions aims at providing individual profiles in order to identify specific strengths and weaknesses of a city in various dimensions. The question, whether "smart" conditions stimulate the economic performance of a city and its hinterland, however, was not sufficiently tackled so far. Consequently, the paper tries to give some empirical evidence on the relation between "smartness" and economic development, especially with regard to the aggravated situation since the beginning of the global economic crisis in 2008. For that purpose, the assumption that "smart" cities are able to resist negative global trends more easily, is tested by contrasting local city profiles with recent regional data on economic development.
In this context, the theoretical concept of "resilience", which refers to the resistance of social, ecological or technical systems to external shocks, is introduced. The paper presents and contrasts three different categories of resilience (engineering resilience, ecological resilience and evolutionary resilience as distinguished by Davoudi 2012) with regard to their relevance for evaluating the economic stability of cities and regions against negative global trends. Based on a short discussion of this approach and the corresponding terminology, an empirical analysis investigates both GDP and employment growth rates in the city-related Nuts-3-regions since 2008. The results shall provide some statistical evidence on the question, whether "smart" cities show a higher degree of shock-resistance or economic resilience to the mechanisms of the global crisis or whether there are at least selected categories of "smartness", which make regions less vulnerable to external challenges and threats. In that way, the evaluation of "smart" urban conditions in the "European Smart City Model", which is based on a predetermined set of manifold indicators, is tested with regard to its explanatory power for regional economic development in general or for economic resilience in particular.

smart cities, resilience

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_251192.pdf