16 - Community Resilience Approach for Prioritizing Infrastructure Development in Urban Areas

Abstract

In India, with over 25% of the total urban population categorized as poor and an estimated urban housing shortage of 26.53 million dwelling units, the cities are one of the more vulnerable locations. The shortage of basic infrastructure provisions and the inadequate capacities of the existing networks add to the vulnerabilities in urban centers, especially under increasingly erratic climatic patterns. A paradigm shift in urban planning practices is needed in order to achieve resilient developments by integrating the principles of disaster risk management. The resiliency of urban regions largely depends on the robustness of critical infrastructures and the socio-economic resilience of the communities. Various resiliency evaluation frameworks, considering the status of urban infrastructures as a key component, propose citywide blanket policies for improving infrastructure services. A prioritization of service provisions or a location for initiating resiliency measures, however, is difficult to define based on these approaches. Although the capacities of urban local bodies are being assessed through various other resiliency evaluation frameworks, few studies focus on evaluating resiliency from the perspective of the local community. This research paper considers the community’s access to life support services and the availability of urban infrastructures as the key measures for resiliency. As observed from the analysis of Nagpur, a city in central India, the discrepancy in infrastructure distributions and varying socio-economic conditions reflects into varied levels of resiliency. The study observes that there cannot be one common approach for all areas of the city. A framework for prioritizing the infrastructure provisions and actions for achieving resiliency in urban areas is, therefore, proposed using the Kano model approach. When overlapped with other parameters of urban growth, it can hint at an appropriate composition of a resilient urban development.