Editorial. Digital Trust and Cyber Resilience: From Technical Protection to Institutional Responsibility

Abstract

The promise of a smart city is often expressed through speed, integration and prediction: services that respond faster, infrastructures that exchange information, and algorithms that anticipate disruption. Yet increasing connectivity also multiplies dependencies. A vulnerability in a public-facing application, a compromised information environment, a poorly governed automated decision or a disruption in a supply chain can extend well beyond its original technical setting. The decisive question is therefore not simply how intelligent a system becomes, but whether its institutions can understand its risks, sustain essential functions, explain decisions and preserve public confidence when conditions deteriorate. This is the central concern of Digital Trust and Cyber Resilience, the Special Issue of Volume 10 of the Smart Cities and Regional Development (SCRD) Journal.

The seven contributions assembled here approach that concern from distinct methodological and geographical perspectives: application security, disinformation and crisis governance, Industry 4.0, Ukrainian cybersecurity policy, multimodal urban mobility, public-sector integrity, and agro-industrial logistics. Their diversity is instructive. Cyber resilience is not one product or one policy domain. It emerges when technical controls, organizational preparedness, institutional accountability and adaptive operational decisions reinforce one another. The papers also reveal an important limit of the smart-city vocabulary: efficiency may be observable under routine conditions while resilience remains untested until systems experience strain.