Urban Resilience in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Transformative Digitalization in European Smart Cities to Address Climate Change

Climate change has been and is still affecting every region in Europe, with varying impacts across the continent. While some cities are generally resilient to CC impacts, other cities are not necessarily as fortunate. Promoting policies that build resilience enhances cities� capabilities to cope with acute shocks and chronic stresses, adapt well to changing climate conditions, and ultimately transform to resilient cities. Conversely, the weak or absence of urban resilience increases the vulnerability of the urban poor to risks. It is therefore imperative to rapidly enhance urban resilience practices. To date, only 26 of 885 cities in Europe have viable adaptation plans, highlighting an imbalance in the adaptation and resilience progression across countries. Although digital transformation through increased data availability and the use of digitalization instruments has the potential to improve the rate of achieving the adaptation strategies, not much has been documented in this regard. Thus, this chapter examines the potentials of digitalization in accelerating adaptation and boosting resilience in selected European cities. Case studies are analysed through a systematic literature search, and evidence of fruitful cases are presented. We conclude by discussing some challenges of digitalization and make recommendations for future works. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.