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the nineteenth-century; today the evolution and common understanding is that during 2020 all main structures and functions of cities and societies have evolved definitively towards a real digital society. Education at all levels, services offered by public administration and private companies, and public and private workers have all been forced to switch from on paper and in presence activities to fully digital ones. In other words, the COVID-19 outbreak may come to represent not only a harsh, indeed tragic, moment for contemporary society, but also an opportunity for an important evolutionary leap, connected with the digital transition. Bearing this in mind, the list of “Major recommendations and implications for post-Covid planning” (as in Table 6), provides a very useful framework for post-COVID-19 urban metabolism research. Each of those recommendations leads to possible enabling technologies, already existing or to be developed, with the aim of coping effectively with the post-pandemic urban scenarios. Resilience and adaptation of urban systems The concept of resilience, now generally used in all scientific fields, is essentially a concept borrowed from materials physics and engineering, describing the capacity of a metal to absorb energy elastically before breaking when subjected to a load or an impact110. The term resilience, understood as the ability to endure
Cavallotti C. 2008, Enciclopedia della Scienza e della Tecnica, Treccani, Roma.
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