Covid-19 epidemic has created new challenges for the development of Smart and Sustainable Cities. It has been proven that it is not sufficient anymore just to focus on providing services for quality of life, or for a better business ecosystem, but we need to prepare cities, so that they are able to manage, adapt, maintain and ensure city services and enhance the quality of life in case of hazards, shocks, and stresses. Following this concept analysis, resilience does not include only earthquakes, fires, floods, etc. but also whatever significantly disrupts the operation of a city either occasionally or periodically. Examples include high unemployment, endemic violence, health epidemics, chronic food and water shortages. Even though some standards and projects exist in this area, we have not yet reached a consensus on a common city resilience model that can describe what exactly resilience constitutes and how a city can become resilient. Furthermore, up to now, little emphasis has been given to the way municipalities are organized for addressing hazards, and even less on staff training on the new skills required.  

 

CRISIS project intends to develop a new job profile for Smart City Resilient Officers (SCROs) as well as design, develop and deliver a pilot training program to certify the first cohort of SCROs. It proposes a holistic approach for the professional development of trainees envisioning to strengthen their competences and increase their employability on the basis of actual competence gaps. It addresses the situation driven by the COVID-19 crisis, which has heavily impacted education by accelerating the need for individual flexibility and the ever-increasing demand for digital skills. Secondly, CRISIS project aims at designing and implementing a learner-centered curriculum, an objective that will be better achieved through flexible learning journeys enabled by the curriculum’s modular structure. Following, market needs analysis done as a preparation activity for this project, the selected competences of the SCRO job profile are analyzed on a Learning Outcomes (LO) basis translating needs into assessable outcomes for learners.

Smart City Resilience Officer (SCRO) is an innovative position in a smart city acting as the city’s central person for planning and building smart city’s resilience capacity. The project aligns itself with the European policies in force, with the general objective of contributing to the development of digital skills for smart cities and, at the same time, the resilience of cities. Since urban resilience is a multifaceted concept that spreads in many dimensions such as social, environmental, economical and infrastructural, an SCRO should have an integrated view of all potential hazards prioritizing the most important ones for a city. This highlights the very dynamic and highly transversal nature of this job role. On top of that, traditional resilience approaches and tools intersect with new opportunities offered by smart cities. Therefore, additional knowledge and skills are required from SCROs to examine and incorporate digital urban infrastructures, smart and autonomous devices, and artificial intelligence, among others, into novel resilience schemes and implementations. While not many cities around the world have such employees, the need for trained professionals to undertake this job role is urgent. Moreover, lack of studies to determine the required competencies of SCROs, as well as the lack of relevant educational programs means that the CRISIS project will shed light on a pressing yet still unaddressed issue of establishing quality curricula to provide prospective SCROs with the necessary skill set for successfully fulfilling their role.

This project mainly focuses on improving digital, transferrable, resilience, and smart cityrelated competences of people interested in seeking job opportunities and careers as SCROs. The need for such trained personnel will grow rapidly in the next few years as more and more cities are becoming digitalized and interconnected. At the same time, growing urbanization, globalization, and climate change constitute three major threats that demand effective resilience strategies and mechanisms.

Specific project objectives are to:

  • Implement a self-assessment tool to identify learning gaps in SCRO competences and determine individual learning experiences and traits
  • Realize an innovative learning journey design tool to define the educational goals and strategy for each learner.
  • Develop a modular SCRO curriculum that will facilitate flexible learning paths.
  • Produce digital OERs for the SCRO competences.
  • Design and develop teaching and learning activities that meet the requirements of different educational strategies.
  • Develop an integrated online platform with adaptivity mechanisms to tailor the teaching and learning process to individual learning goals and strategies.
  • Pilot the SCRO curriculum in 4 project countries with participants from smart cities and from the project associate partners and produce the first cohort of certified SCROs.
  • Evaluate CRISIS tools, methodologies, platform, curriculum, learning material, and pilot course to identify inadequacies and best practices – Promote, disseminate and exploit the results at national and European levels.