This document discusses the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol and its work on smart cities and urban resilience. The Cabot Institute examines challenges facing future cities like water security, hazards, climate change, and more. It is working to develop new approaches to systems resilience that account for deep uncertainty and complexity in urban systems. Specific projects discussed include high-resolution flood modeling, integrating sensor data into city operations, and examining air pollution and health impacts. The document raises questions about who will use and benefit from Bristol's smart city initiatives and how open such systems will truly be.

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Building Community
Catalysing New Ideas
Engaging and Educating
Cabot Institute
Living with Environmental Uncertainty

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Smart Cities =
Sustainable and Resilient Cities
(Why smart cities are necessary to make cities
sustainable and resilient)

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Future cities
and
communities
Water Security
Hazards
Low Carbon
Energy
Climate and
Environmental
Change
Food

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Smart Cities = Sustainable and
Resilient Cities

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Smart Cities = Sustainable and
Resilient Cities

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Smart Cities = Sustainable and
Resilient Cities

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Smart Cities = Sustainable and
Resilient Cities

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Smart Cities = Sustainable and
Resilient Cities

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Community
Partnerships
Bristol Is Open Smart Metering
Smart Cities = Sustainable and
Resilient Cities

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Bristol is one of only three UK Cities chosen by
the Rockefeller Foundation

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The Foundation requires resiliency to two major
urban challenges:
Those that are chronic
But also shocks

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Risk is becoming increasingly complex

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Global Warming:
Trimming the tails but uncertainty
(irreducible?) remains

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Uncertainty in warming propagates into
many other factors
Does not consider
significant melting of
Antarctic or
Greenland Ice Sheets

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Deeper Uncertainty:
Change in annual rainfall by 2100

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And this deep complexity and
associated uncertainty is true for
many, many systems

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New forms of Systems Resilience
that encompass this profound
uncertainty and complexity

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Floods
We develop dynamic flood
models at building-resolving
scales with grids of up to 100M
cells and use these to predict
inundation patterns
Example: 4 hour rainfall event
(based on October 2011 storm)
for Dublin, Ireland, modelled at
5 m resolution over a LIDAR
grid

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Floods
OLD SCHOOL: Model the city at high
resolution and see where the
weaknesses and break points are
NEW SCHOOL:
• High Resolution
• Can interact with real time
sensor data
• Can presumably feed data into
the City Operating System
• Allows us to build fluid resilience
right into our system

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Air Pollution
Daily Mail

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Air Pollution

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Air Pollution

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Healthy Cities
From Cycling and Netwalking to the Home

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Infrastructure
Resiliency
Smart Cities
GURP
BIO
Graduate
School
Education
Human
Geography
Systems Centre
Centre for Urban
and Public Policy
Research
Economics
Community
Law
The city?
Business?
Communities?
Individuals?
Progressing these projects:
Who will use Bristol is Open – and how?
Or how open is open?