Enhancing Sustainability and Resilience through Multi-Level Infrastructure Planning.

Jorge Salas,Víctor Yepes

doi:10.3390/ijerph17030962

Abstract

Resilient planning demands not only resilient actions, but also resilient implementation, which promotes adaptive capacity for the attainment of the planned objectives. This requires, in the case of multi-level infrastructure systems, the simultaneous pursuit of bottom-up infrastructure planning for the promotion of adaptive capacity, and of top-down approaches for the achievement of global objectives and the reduction of structural vulnerabilities and imbalances. Though several authors have pointed out the need to balance bottom-up flexibility with top-down hierarchical control for better plan implementation, very few methods have yet been developed with this aim, least of all with a multi-objective perspective. This work addressed this lack by including, for the first time, the mitigation of urban vulnerability, the improvement of road network condition, and the minimization of the economic cost as objectives in a resilient planning process in which both actions and their implementation are planned for a controlled, sustainable development. Building on Urban planning support system (UPSS), a previously developed planning tool, the improved planning support system affords a planning alternative over the Spanish road network, with the best multi-objective balance between optimization, risk, and opportunity. The planning process then formalizes local adaptive capacity as the capacity to vary the selected planning alternative within certain limits, and global risk control as the duties that should be achieved in exchange. Finally, by means of multi-objective optimization, the method reveals the multi-objective trade-offs between local opportunity, global risk, and rights and duties at local scale, thus providing deeper understanding for better informed decision-making.

Highlights

IntroductionImplementation Planning as a Part of Resilient Planning
Salas and Yepes [39] presented VisualUVAM, a software that affords the urban vulnerability assessment of cities, provinces, and regions of Spain. This software extended the scope of possible variables for the characterization of urban vulnerability (UV) from the three basic criteria adopted by the Spanish Observatory of Urban Vulnerability (OVU) to a wider set of 36 possible indicators, among which the method selected those most suitable according to several criteria
The trade-offs between planning objectives (Figure 6) showed that the overall urban vulnerability mitigation (UVM (Net)) and road network condition improvement (RCI (Net)) objectives were aligned, which was consistent with the idea of the contribution of net infrastructures to the mitigation of urban vulnerability [4,19]

Summary

Introduction

Implementation Planning as a Part of Resilient Planning. The concept of resilience was first introduced into ecological theory by Holling [1] as a measure of the capacity of a system to absorb change and external disturbance while maintaining key functions, and it is rapidly gaining ground in the urban sustainability literature [2]. In the field of urban infrastructure planning, resilient planning studies can refer to “planning” for a more resilient city, or to the “resiliency” of an urban planning, and, together, both approaches provide a constructive option for a controlled sustainable development of social–ecological systems [3]. While the first aspect focuses on the planning of actions leading to the improvement of a city’s resilience, the second has to do with the implementation of these actions within an urban framework. In this context, refers to a more flexible, adaptable approach for dealing with dynamic problems arising. Public Health 2020, 17, 962; doi:10.3390/ijerph17030962 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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