Assessing Resilience of Urban Critical Infrastructure Networks: A Case Study of Ahvaz, Iran

Hadi Alizadeh,Ayyoob Sharifi

doi:10.3390/su12093691

Hadi Alizadeh, Ayyoob Sharifi

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093691

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Abstract

Cities around the world increasingly recognize the need to build on their resilience to deal with the converging forces of urbanization and climate change. Given the significance of critical infrastructure for maintaining quality of life in cities, improving their resilience is of high importance to planners and policy makers. The main purpose of this study is to spatially analyze the resilience of water, electricity, and gas critical infrastructure networks in Ahvaz, a major Iranian city that has been hit by various disastrous events over the past few years. Towards this goal, we first conducted a two-round Delphi survey to identify criteria that can be used for determining resilience of critical infrastructure networks across different parts of the city. The selected criteria that were used for spatial analysis are related to the physical texture, the design pattern, and the scale of service provision of the critical infrastructure networks. Results showed that, overall, critical infrastructure networks in Ahvaz do not perform well against the measurement criteria. This is specially the case in Regions 1, 2, 4, and 6, which are characterized by issues such as old and centralized infrastructure networks and high levels of population density. The study highlights the need to make improvements in terms of the robustness, redundancy, and flexibility of the critical infrastructure networks in the city.

Highlights

Cities have traditionally been hubs of innovation and economic growth and have played major roles in the regional and national development processes
There is no universal definition for resilience, in the context of urban infrastructure, it is often linked to capacities related to mitigation and absorption of shocks and rapid recovery to pre-disaster conditions [4,5]
To conduct the spatial analysis, the geo-referenced GIS data related to water, electricity, and gas networks was obtained from the Water and Wastewater Engineering Company, the Grid Management Company, and the National Iranian Gas Company, respectively

Summary

Introduction

Cities have traditionally been hubs of innovation and economic growth and have played major roles in the regional and national development processes. The concept of resilience has a long history, it was not introduced to the urban studies field until the late years of the 1990s. Since it has been widely used and is expected to get even more attention since the planet is rapidly urbanizing and the frequency and intensity of disastrous events are expected to increase due to climate change [3]. Critical infrastructures are essential components of cities and their continuous functionality is crucial for maintaining acceptable levels of quality of life [6]. Enhancing resilience of critical infrastructure systems to natural disaster events (e.g., earthquakes and floods) as well as man-made events (e.g., terrorist attacks) is of significant importance. It is argued that critical infrastructure systems should be robust enough to resist failures and/or rapidly gain back their functionality in case of partial failures [6,7]

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