Abstract
Urban Resilience has recently emerged as a systematic approach to urban sustainability. The malleable definition of resilience has rendered its operationalisation an intriguing task for contemporary cities trying to address their organisational problems and confront uncertainty in a holistic manner. In this article we investigate the implementation challenges emerging for Resilient Strategies by the inattention paid to urban geological risk. We conceptualise urban geological risk as the combination of urban geohazards, geological vulnerability and exposure of the built environment and focus on the case study of Thessaloniki, Greece, a city that joined the 100 Resilient Cities initiative in 2014 and published its “Resilience Strategy 2030” (RS) in 2017. After a review of the RS, historical records of natural hazard events and with evidence gathered through interviews with city officials, we emphasize on earthquakes and surface flooding as the most relevant geohazards for Thessaloniki to tackle in its journey towards urban resilience. First, we examine geological vulnerability to earthquakes in conjunction with exposure of the built environment, as an outcome of ageing building stock, high building densities and the urban configuration, in Acheiropoietos neighbourhood, within the historic centre of the city. Then, we explore geological risk to surface flooding in Perea, in Thermaikos Municipality, with a particular focus on flash floods, by demonstrating how limited consideration of local geomorphology as well as semi-regulated urban expansion and its limited connection with emergency planning increase exposure of the built environment to surface flooding. Finally, we come up with the major implementation challenges Thessaloniki’s RS faces with regard to urban geohazards.
Highlights
Protection of urban environments against uncertainty has always been a stimulating task for local authorities around the world
Except for a few mentions of local topography and past experiences of natural hazards that affected the city, there is not a clear holistic framework for tackling urban geohazards and integrating geological and geomorphological conditions into risk reduction, eventually reflecting the Resilience Strategy 2030” (RS) implementation challenges [15]. To highlight these implementation challenges, we focus on the two specific geohazards, earthquakes and surface flooding, that were identified by the Preliminary Resilience Assessment (PRA) as the most imminent acute shocks for the city
We investigate the case of Thessaloniki, Greece, a city that was introduced to resilience principles for the first time in 2014 and published its Strategy in 2017
Summary
Protection of urban environments against uncertainty has always been a stimulating task for local authorities around the world. The malleability of the term, in conjunction with the variety of disciplinary fields in which it is being applied, has generated confusion and policy implementation gaps [4]. The challenge of incorporating geological risk due to urban geohazards into strategic urban policies is a vivid example of this confusion. Many important global urban development institutions, such as the UNISDR, are acknowledging the fundamental connection between hazards and resilience, framing their definition of the term as ‘the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions through risk management’ [5]
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