Resilience from a multi-level network perspective
Summary of the European Alliance Against Coronavirus Daily Webinar on 6 July 2020.
This morning session was dedicated to the concept of resilience, as it is one of the keywords in the European Recovery Plan. Expert Prof. Céline Rozenblat from University of Lausanne introduced the resilience concept from a multi-level network perspective, highlighting how an analogy can be found regarding the analysis and optimization of resilience between city networks and cluster networks.
It takes a lot of effort to map a multi-level network. Taking the example of cities: The project “United Nations Habitat III (2016) - 2030 Agenda”, which involved 5,539 statements and 467 stakeholders with 359 meetings, mapped the connectivity of cities very intensively. The theoretical approach includes four main dimensions: organizational, spatial, physical and functional. In mapping all these dimensions, the network becomes visible.
Within the network, there are three levels on which the actors interact: (i) micro, (ii) meso and (iii) macro:
- The micro level develops micro processes in order to create a very cohesive community. All the actors are collaborating with different member of network (micro-processes)
- The meso level develops network economies generating connection between different continents that - within themselves - develop cohesion with different cities (agglomeration economies)
- The macro level is the last one and develops the resilience of systems of cities (network economies)
For all networks, including clusters and industrial networks, resilience represents a useful and powerful feature, since it provides robustness to the system (“Interdependent similar networks are more robust to random failure than a randomly independent network”). It gives the strength to better react to exogenous and endogenous system threats. During the discussion, the attention has been focused also on how technology can be used to measure network resilience – especially Artificial Intelligence might have some applications which would be interesting to explore.
A recording of the session is available here.
These are the complete minutes of the meeting:
20200706 ECA dailyminutes_v2.pdfThis is the presentation from the meeting:
European Cluster Alliance_2020_Rozenblat (1).pdfFind information on the previous meetings here; information on the upcoming agenda here.
