Choosing a holistic urban resilience assessment tool

Abstract

Those involved in making resilience strategies and planning are struggling to understand the dynamic and complexity of urban areas and should be presented with a systematic tool, both in assessment and planning, to help them make important choices about which actions, plans, and policies to implement. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that these methods are based on sound theory and are simple and comprehensible. Proper and accurate measurement of resilience are the steppingstones in developing effective resilience plan. Recently, there has been efforts to create tools to measure resilience in urban areas. Several tools have been created, however, there is a lack of evidence-based analysis into these assessment tools. This study is going to address this gap by finding a systemic and holistic approach to assess resilience. The aim is to determine the criteria required for assessing the resilience of the urban complex system by asking series of questions. Furthermore, existing urban resilience assessment tools evaluated to determine whether they can measure urban resilience holistically. Any method to assess resiliency in complex urban systems has to take a holistic approach. The whole urban system needs to be studied to be able to determine the overall behaviour of the system. The Auckland region was chosen to demonstrate how the study's concepts can be applied. Following consideration of specific resiliency criteria, 28 questions were developed evaluate the assessment tools. The Disaster Resilience Scorecard was chosen as the best measuring tool for the determined criteria to be ran within a city.