Rome was not built in a day. Resilience and the eternal city: insights for urban management

Resilience has been intensely investigated as the viable quality of individuals, groups, organizations, and systems to respond productively to notable change without engaging in an extended period of regressive behaviour. Recently, there has been growing attention to the relationship between resilience and cities. To contribute to this stimulating debate, this paper first provides the theoretical framework and links the concept of resilience to urban studies. Subsequently, it enlightens, through a systems perspective and the aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) methodology, the possibility to enrich the information variety endowment of urban policymakers, generated by new information units, to foster resilience capabilities in the urban context. Specifically, a large-scale text analysis study was conducted on the city of Rome to understand the sentiments expressed within the text generated online by citizens and visitors. The positive or negative sentiments linked to the hidden problems of the urban context were organized within collective perception-based maps for each of the analysed points of interest (POIs). Since cities represent complex decision-making contexts, this study aimed to outline a methodology and a tool that would help foster resilient thinking in urban policies by enriching the diversity of the information variety endowment of urban decision-makers.