At the Smart City Exchange Forum in Tallinn, one message rose above the rest: resilience is no longer a side issue. It is becoming the basic condition of urban survival.
At the Smart City Exchange Forum 2026, held in mid-March in Tallinn, the word resilience gradually shed its conference-polish vagueness and became something far sharper: the organising principle of urban life in an age of overlapping shocks.
By the end of the day, after speeches and panels covering everything from floods and climate risk to cyberattacks, emergency coordination, digital dependency and EU funding, one conclusion had become difficult to avoid. The modern city is no longer simply trying to become smarter. It is trying to remain functional under permanent stress.
Floods, heatwaves, ageing infrastructure, cyber insecurity, disinformation, war preparedness, social fragmentation, energy vulnerability and institutional overload are no longer separate policy themes waiting neatly in line. They collide, reinforce one another and increasingly arrive at once. If the old urban promise was efficiency, the new one is resilience.
The forum was organised by the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, whose work sits at the intersection of research, city development and practical experimentation. That role was repeatedly visible throughout the day – not only in convening city leaders, researchers and practitioners, but in pushing the discussion beyond slogans towards methods, tools and institutional reality.
Resilience as practical governance
Tallinn Mayor Peeter Raudsepp opened the conference with a clear statement of intent: resilience is “not optional”, “not theoretical” and no longer a secondary concern. It is “practical governance”.
His point was direct. Cities are dense, interconnected systems. Transport, energy, water, digital services and emergency response do not fail in isolation. When one breaks, others begin to wobble. In that sense, resilience is not merely a technical issue but a systemic one.
Preparedness, Raudsepp argued, means making decisions before the crisis, not after it. It means ensuring that when disruption occurs, hospitals continue to function, schools remain open, public transport keeps moving, digital services remain accessible and communication stays transparent.
There was also a distinctly Estonian dimension to his speech. In a highly digital society, digital systems are now critical infrastructure. If digital identity fails, public services fail. If communication systems are compromised, trust in data integrity suffers. Governance itself is weakened.
Yet Raudsepp also stressed a limit that many smart-city conversations still prefer to blur: technology cannot build resilience on its own. Citizens must understand how systems function. Community engagement must be real. Trust must be built before the emergency arrives.
The anatomy of a resilient city
That wider view was taken further by Esteban Leon, head of the City Resilience Global Programme at UN-Habitat, who drew on more than two decades of work in disaster-hit and conflict-affected cities.
His argument was simple but powerful: cities cannot keep “running after disasters”. By the time they react, they are already late. The task is to build cities capable of withstanding, adapting and recovering before a shock turns into collapse.
Leon’s keynote framed the city as a living organism. Its skeleton is spatial structure – where and how it is built. Its organs are infrastructure and ecosystems. Its heart is its communities and economy. Its nervous system is governance and institutions. If one part is weak, the rest suffer.
That framing mattered because it pushed the discussion well beyond engineering. Floods do not become humanitarian disasters because of rain alone, Leon argued, but because of inequality. Heatwaves do not become deadly because of temperature alone, but because of poor urban design.
Communities recover not simply because institutions intervene, but because they are connected, organised and empowered. “Social cohesion,” he said, “is not a soft concept. It is critical infrastructure.”
He returned to the same point later in the panel on emergency response. What cities most often underestimate, he said, is how bad things can become. People often understand the scale of a crisis only when they are already inside it.
Why cities still struggle to act early
If Leon gave the day its moral and structural centre, Peeter Vihma, researcher and social scientist at Tallinn University of Technology, offered one of its sharpest critiques of urban governance.
Cities, he argued, still tend to separate long-term strategic planning from short-term emergency response. One part of the administration writes strategy. Another deals with “sandbags”. That may once have worked when crises were isolated and relatively rare. It does not work in a world of overlapping crises, climate pressure and institutional strain.
Drawing on experiments in Finland, Vihma described efforts to apply the logic of high-reliability governance – the kind used in settings such as nuclear plants, electricity grids and other systems where catastrophic failure is not negotiable – to city planning.
His team built what he called a policy operations room, where Helsinki’s strategic plans were stress-tested against a synthetic future scenario: a prolonged heatwave, smoke from Russian forest fires, airport disruption and catastrophic rainfall modelled on the 2011 Copenhagen storm.
The lesson was striking. Data alone is not enough. Different experts read maps and dashboards differently. Some decision-makers do not read them at all. If cities want interdisciplinary action, they have to make future crisis visible, legible and emotionally real.
That was why Vihma’s team even created a fake newsreel showing how such a polycrisis would be experienced and reported. Politicians, he noted dryly, may care about strategy, but they care especially about whether they will be blamed.
His wider point stayed with the room: the problem is not that cities have too little data, but that they often have too much and still fail to turn it into actionable knowledge.
London’s lesson: data matters, but so does who gets hit
A similar concern surfaced in the keynote by Kristen Guida, head of strategy, prevention and community resilience at the Greater London Authority.
London, she said, is an extremely data-rich city. It has a large open datastore, extensive mapping capacity and strong partnerships with universities and research institutions. But data is not an end in itself. It is useful only when it helps answer the right question.
Guida showed how London uses data to understand surface-water flood risk, heat vulnerability, green infrastructure potential and infrastructure coordination. But the most important point in her presentation was less technical than social.
Climate risk, she argued, is not only about rainfall or heat. It is also about who is vulnerable when those things happen. London’s climate-risk maps combine exposure data with indicators of social vulnerability, such as deprivation, age and limited English proficiency. The result is a clearer picture of unequal impact.
Her formulation was memorable: “We may all face the same flood, but some people have better boats.”
Guida also widened the conversation from acute shocks to chronic risks: those structural pressures – inequality, deprivation, weak social cohesion – that make visible crises more destructive. In her telling, resilience is not only about emergency response but about preventing hazards from becoming disasters in the first place.
And communities, she added, often understand risk differently from resilience professionals. Officials may think in terms of floods, heatwaves or terrorism. Residents may be more worried about cohesion, food prices, energy bills or fear of crime. If cities do not recognise that divergence, they risk building technically impressive systems that remain socially detached.
Emergency response begins with communication
The panel on Emergency Coordination & Response in Urban Crises, moderated by this author, brought the discussion down to the point where resilience either works or does not.
Elari Kasemets, head of the Municipal Police of the City of Tallinn, said the first coordination failure he worries about in a crisis is situational awareness. At the start of an emergency, cities often have either too little information or too much. The task is to work out what is actually happening, and what should happen first.
Tallinn’s response model, he said, rests on joint planning and continuity of operations. Even in crisis, every agency and service must continue fulfilling its own duties.
A practical example was Tallinn’s New Year’s Eve water shortage, triggered by the rare phenomenon of needle ice and unusually high demand. It was not the kind of crisis that appears in neat strategic scenarios, but it happened nonetheless. In that moment, communication mattered as much as technical intervention.
Asked directly whether Tallinn prepares for war, Kasemets answered plainly: yes. At city level, that means civil defence, shelters and ensuring that people think seriously about how they would manage without electricity or communications for several days.
From a regional perspective, Eva Næss Karlsen, chief adviser at the Oslo Region Alliance, stressed the same fundamentals: trust, communication and preparedness across municipal boundaries. Whether in the Covid pandemic or after a fatal landslide in the Oslo region, the need was the same – to know who is responsible, how to reach the public and how to coordinate across jurisdictions.
The panel also confronted the role of private companies. In both Tallinn and London, many essential services are delivered by private operators.
Kasemets explained that Estonian law allows continuity requirements to be imposed on providers of vital services. Kristen Guida added that in London, utility providers are part of resilience-planning structures, while broader business networks help cascade information and can even become part of the response itself.
Community is not a slogan
One of the strongest sections of the emergency panel was the discussion on community resilience.
Leon cautioned against romanticising the word “community”. Everyone is part of the community – residents, businesses, local authorities, national institutions. Drawing on post-earthquake Haiti, he argued that urban response demanded a neighbourhood approach because different parts of the same city can vary enormously in social structure, building quality, land use and vulnerability.
One of his most important points was that populations that have gone through crisis should be treated as assets, not liabilities. Around 80 per cent of reconstruction, he said, is carried out by affected communities themselves. The role of institutions is to strengthen that capacity, not replace it.
Guida echoed the point from London. Rather than trying to define community resilience in abstract terms, her team asked what it actually wanted to achieve.
The answer came down to three things: building connections between communities and responders, providing practical tools and support, and helping institutions themselves learn how to work better with people. One of her key principles was elegantly simple: make friends before you need them.
Valencia: disaster, data and a hard lesson in coordination
The conference then moved to Digital Resilience in Smart Cities, a keynote by Ernesto Faubel, head of smart city and data management at the City of Valencia and chair of LDT CitiVERSE EDIC.
Faubel began with Valencia’s long memory of disaster. The catastrophic flood of 1957 led to one of Europe’s most dramatic urban transformations: the diversion of the Turia River and the eventual creation of the great linear park that now runs through the city. Disaster, in that case, produced a more liveable city.
But the story returned in harsher form with the DANA floods of 2024, which killed more than 240 people and devastated around 70 towns and municipalities in Valencia’s southern metropolitan area. Entire areas were buried in mud. Trucks floated “like paper boats”. Around 150,000 vehicles were destroyed. The scale of damage was extraordinary.
Valencia itself was largely protected by the diverted river infrastructure. But the surrounding devastation forced the city to think much harder about environmental and technological risk.
Faubel outlined the digital tools Valencia now uses: GIS, IoT sensors, digital twins, field-data tools and business-intelligence dashboards. These tools helped the city assess damaged streets, debris, businesses and vulnerable households quickly. But what made his keynote unusually valuable was not just the catalogue of tools; it was his honesty about failure.
During and after the DANA flood, he admitted, data was not managed well. Coordination failed. Information was not shared properly. The control centre existed, but it did not function as it should. There were delays and disagreements over warnings and communication.
That led to one of the day’s most quotable observations. The danger, he suggested, is not only bad data but “data crazy” – cities producing huge amounts of information without making real use of it. The challenge is getting the right data to the right person, at the right moment and in the right form.
Beyond the tech fix
The second panel, Smart, Safe and Resilient: Beyond the Tech Fix, gave the day one of its clearest correctives. Moderated by Sille Sepp, head of urban data ecosystems at the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, it pushed back against the idea that digitalisation on its own can make cities resilient.
Sepp opened with the point that had increasingly become impossible to ignore: resilience is not a technology stream. It is multi-dimensional, cross-departmental and cross-sectoral. It demands people, processes, governance and ways of working together.
Lita Akmentina, cities expert and researcher at the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, brought in the concept of the slow-burn crisis.
Climate change, she argued, is exactly the kind of long, cumulative crisis that societies often fail to address until it hardens into urban breakdown. Population decline, economic vulnerability and infrastructural weakening belong to the same category. These are not dramatic enough to dominate public attention, yet destructive enough to hollow out cities over time.
The key challenge, she suggested, is political as much as technical. Cities must become more willing to make uncomfortable decisions earlier – before the crisis becomes impossible to ignore.
From Kyiv, Denys Nazarenko, CIO adviser at Kyiv City Council, brought the day’s hardest realism. For him, resilience became concrete during the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, when cyberattacks, disinformation, power outages and rising social demand all collided at once.
Technology mattered, but only as an amplifier. If institutions did not know how to function under pressure, digital tools would not save them.
Nazarenko’s concept of “resilience by design” distilled the larger message of the conference. It means, first, clear assignment of roles. Second, targeted communication that tells people exactly what is happening and what they should do. Third, operational visibility – not fragmented data, but a common picture that helps leaders coordinate. Resilience, in his formulation, is about how institutions, information, operations and communities are organised before and during crisis.
The panel also returned to risk and justice. Asked how cities should account for the fact that risk means different things to different groups, Akmentina stressed that vulnerability varies sharply even within one city. Resilience and adaptation, she argued, must include a justice perspective: who benefits from policy, and who is left exposed?
Faubel added that cities must focus on the risks where they have real competence to act. Municipalities cannot solve geopolitics from city hall, but they can improve preparedness, environmental adaptation and cyber security.
Sometimes, he noted, the practical lessons are surprisingly basic: after Spain’s national power cut in April 2025, it became obvious that many people were unprepared even for a short-term outage. Water, a camping stove, lighters and a battery-powered radio suddenly mattered again.
The panel’s final round brought the conversation down to the local human scale. Akmentina urged people to prepare at home, know their neighbours and take basic emergency training seriously.
Faubel argued for sensible use of data and stronger collaboration between cities. Nazarenko ended with perhaps the neatest definition of the day: resilience is a deliberate governance discipline, expressed through how decisions are made, how responsibility is assigned, and how institutions behave under pressure.
The money problem
From there, the discussion moved to financing.
In a sober keynote, René Reisner, green transition coordinator at the Estonian climate ministry, reminded the audience that cities may have climate plans, adaptation strategies and sustainability documents, but without money they remain words.
His topic was EU funding – a subject he described, with some justification, as both extremely difficult and poorly explained even by those inside the system. The key challenge, he said, is not only finding money but understanding how the system actually works and what sort of project fits what sort of instrument.
His central distinction was useful. National funding usually supports core public services, routine infrastructure and scaling proven solutions. EU funding, by contrast, far more often focuses on innovation, experimentation, cooperation, knowledge transfer and scalable models. That makes it valuable, but also frustrating for municipalities that simply want practical projects delivered.
Resilient cities, Reisner argued, are not only well planned but well financed. And to become well financed, cities need not only ambition but enough administrative capacity to move from idea to pilot to bankable investment.
The next decade: resilience or dependence
The conference’s future-facing keynote came from Laura Halenius, senior lead for growth from critical technologies at the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, who asked a question that gave the day a sharper geopolitical edge: are we sleepwalking into digital dependency?
Many governments and cities, she argued, are optimising systems for efficiency and cost while becoming quietly dependent on infrastructures they neither control nor fully understand. Most digital services Europeans use daily are non-European.
Only a tiny fraction of AI infrastructure is European. In a more unstable world, that is not merely an economic issue. It is a resilience problem.
Her examples were uncomfortably close to home: GPS interference, cable disruptions, constant cyber pressure and deep dependence on cloud services. If a major provider were suddenly unavailable, how many city systems would continue to function?
Halenius’s answer was not anti-technology, but anti-complacency. Digital resilience is about maintaining control over critical capabilities. Public institutions matter here not only as regulators but as buyers. If Europe wants stronger digital sovereignty, it will have to help build the market for more resilient services.
Her conclusion was one of the day’s stronger takeaways: the cities that become truly resilient over the next decade will not be the ones that merely talk about resilience. They will be the ones that practise it – routinely, continuously, almost as a civic habit.
A city is never finished
The closing reflections by Ralf-Martin Soe, founding director and smart city researcher at the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, brought the day back to first principles.
A city, he said, is messier than a human body because it is the sum of many bodies, many systems and many contradictions at once. It is constantly changing. People arrive and leave. Infrastructure ages minute by minute. Roads, pipes, buildings, systems and institutions are always under reconstruction. A city is never complete.
That may have been the conference’s most honest idea.
Resilience is not perfection. It is not the elimination of risk. It is not a dashboard, a pilot or a strategy document. It is the capacity of a city to keep functioning, keep learning and keep adapting in a world where one crisis rarely waits for the last one to end.
And that, finally, was the real message from Tallinn: resilience is no longer something cities can afford to discuss later. It is becoming the condition of staying a city at all.
