Smart open governance for urban flood disasters: transforming emergency capabilities

The surge in urban flood disasters underscores the need for innovative emergency governance in cities. Information and Communication Technology advancements have catalyzed the development of a novel governance model termed smart open governance. This model prioritizes extensive public involvement and large-scale, pop-up, personalized collaborative efforts. Through intensive review of existing literature, it becomes evident that smart open governance for urban flood disasters is an evolving interdisciplinary field, integrating urban governance, disaster management, and technological innovation. The model includes five distinctive features: radical openness, citizen-centric approach, interconnected intelligence, digital altruism, and crowdsourced deliberation. These characteristics signify a transformative shift in emergency governance capabilities for floods, involving platformizing government functions, intelligently connecting social resources, engaging residents as central actors, and facilitating large-scale, customized co-creation of emergency solutions. Smart open governance for urban flood disasters relies on improving residents’ emergency response capabilities, fostering public participation in disaster management, leveraging ICT support, optimizing the allocation of emergency resources, and strengthening government institutional support. This model effectively complements the limitations of existing government-led, technology-driven flood disaster emergency management, offering new directions to emergency management and innovation in the smart era of urban flood disasters.