Resilience Of Urban Systems Research Articles

City Water Resilience Framework: A governance based planning tool to enhance urban water resilience

• The ability to manage and build urban water resilience will depend on how the city is managing and governing its water resources and services and how it is addressing the water-related shocks and stresses • There is an increasing demand for innovative tools and guidance to apply water resilience concept in practice. • With empirical evidence, the paper presents a water resilience assessment framework that includes a set of resilience indicators that will guide in building urban water resilience • Critical dimensions to build urban water resilience: infrastructure and ecosystems, health and wellbeing, planning and finance, and leadership and strategy. The resilience model is an increasingly well-established paradigm of urban planning that guides responses to water related shocks and stresses, such as floods, droughts. However, due to limited studies and guidance on how to apply the concept of water resilience in practice, there is a growing demand for innovative tools that can help urban planners make better decisions and investments for a resilient urban water system. This paper presents a governance-based water resilience planning tool called the City Water Resilience Framework (CWRF), which is designed to meet this need. CWRF enables cities to collectively assess and plan for strengthening urban water resilience. It has been co-created through research and a robust peer-review process with eight partner cities and consultation with global experts. Based on this research, different factors of resilience were identified, which informed the development of CWRF, that includes a set of resilience goals, sub-goals and indicators, categorised across four dimensions: infrastructure and ecosystems, health and wellbeing, planning and finance, and leadership and strategy. Evidence is presented from the application of CWRF in Cape Town and Greater Miami and the Beaches (GM&B), which informed the cities' key water planning and strategies by integrating water resilience factors and activities.

Urban Flood Resilience through Spatial Plan in Bandung City, Indonesia

According to New Urban Agenda, the spatial plan has been promoted as an instrument to strengthen urban resilience. In the context of urban flood resilience, flood management measures could be incorporated into the spatial plan to address inundation and flood risks. However, the existence of a spatial plan does not necessarily reduce inundation and flood risks due to the ineffectiveness of spatial plan implementation and/or insufficient flood management measures. This study aims to examine flood management measures within Bandung’s spatial plan in achieving urban flood resilience in the future. We combine flood management measures framework and characteristics of urban system resilience as an analytical framework. The effectiveness of flood management measures is highly associated with the topographic characteristics and the combination of measures selected in suitable locations. We use thematic analysis to identify flood management measures in Bandung’s Spatial Plan and compare the result with the spatial distribution of future inundation and flood risks data from the previous study. We reveal that flood management measures in Bandung’s spatial plan have not been selected and located based on ecological constraints and future inundation information. This study demonstrates the importance of flood risks information to formulate an effective spatial plan for urban flood resilience.

Urban stormwater management for sustainable and resilient measures and practices: a review.

Stormwater drainage in urban areas has become a challenge due to the rapid and random growth of urban areas, removal of vegetation, reduction in the effectiveness of drainage infrastructure, and climate change. Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS), Low Impact Development (LID), Best Management Practices (BMP), Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) and the Sponge City Programme (SCP) are various aspects for urban stormwater management in a few parts of the world. Urban hydrology plays a vital role in the urban stormwater management system. However, optimal results can only be possible when the combined effect of climate change, land use patterns, reuse, treatment, ecology, and societal aspects are considered. There is a need to provide sustainable and resilient urban drainage systems to manage stormwater more efficiently. The present review has thoroughly discussed various features related to urban stormwater management, highlighted key drivers, identified knowledge gaps in each of the measures and/or practices, recommended future research needs of urban stormwater management to become sustainable and resilient. Integrated modelling approaches considering various key drivers including reuse and real time governance enables stormwater management to be sustainable and resilient in urban environments.

How People Foraging in Urban Greenspace Can Mobilize Social–Ecological Resilience During Covid-19 and Beyond

Informal foraging for food and other natural materials in urban greenspaces is an activity undertaken by many across the world. For some, foraging is a necessary means of survival and livelihood, while for others, it provides cultural and recreational opportunities. In the socioeconomic crises induced by Covid-19, foraging can help communities, especially (but not exclusively) vulnerable people, cope with the impacts of lockdowns, and associated economic decline. In the long run, foraging can help improve social–ecological resilience in urban systems, particularly in response to climate, economic, and disease disruptions. First, we elaborate the ways in which urban foraging can provide immediate relief from the shocks to natural, human, social, physical, and financial capital. We then describe how over time, the livelihood, food, and income diversification brought about by foraging can contribute to preparedness for future uncertainties and gradual change. Cities are increasingly becoming home to the majority of humanity, and urban foraging can be one of the pathways that makes cities more liveable, for humans as well as other species we coexist with. Through the capitals framework, we explore the role foraging could play in addressing issues of biodiversity conservation, culture, and education, good governance and social justice, multifunctional greenspace, and sustainable nature-based livelihoods in urban areas.

Resilience of Interdependent Urban Socio-Physical Systems using Large-Scale Mobility Data: Modeling Recovery Dynamics

Cities are complex systems comprised of socioeconomic systems relying on critical services delivered by multiple physical infrastructure networks. Due to interdependencies between social and physical systems, disruptions caused by natural hazards may cascade across systems, amplifying the impact of disasters. Despite the increasing threat posed by climate change and rapid urban growth, how to design interdependencies between social and physical systems to achieve resilient cities have been largely unexplored. Here, we study the socio-physical interdependencies in urban systems and their effects on disaster recovery and resilience, using large-scale mobility data collected from Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria. We find that as cities grow in scale and expand their centralized infrastructure systems, the recovery efficiency of critical services improves, however, curtails the self-reliance of socio-economic systems during crises. Results show that maintaining self-reliance among social systems could be key in developing resilient urban socio-physical systems for cities facing rapid urban growth.

Towards resilient and smart urban road networks: Connectivity restoration via community structure

In the time of global warming, smart and resilient cities need to have the ability to give quick responses to today’s frequent natural disasters. Building a resilient urban transportation system that can timely recover the accessibility of the rescue facilities is vital to the survival chances of citizens. From the perspective of selectively road restoration, we proposed a mixed integer programming model that is based on community hierarchy to provide quick disaster response for damaged urban road networks. This model can efficiently find roads that should give repairing priority to maximize the connectivity in a limited repairing scale. Network community structure has been innovatively introduced into our model, which can remarkably simplify the searching process by extracting critical connectivity information. The model has been tested on square-shaped road networks and Istanbul road networks. The results show that our community structure model gives superior solutions in significantly reduced computational time, and is practical in solving complex real-world large-scale connectivity repairing problems. These findings provide new insights into the understanding of the important role played by mesoscopic topological knowledge of road networks when seeking strategies and solutions for connectivity emergency restoration, which is significant for the development of resilient and sustainable cities. • We propose a community-based MIP approach for connectivity restoration. • The restoration strategies take the advantage of the mesoscopic structure. • The community structure markedly facilitates the optimization process. • The developed algorithms operate on large-scale urban road networks.

Data-driven accident consequence assessment on urban gas pipeline network based on machine learning

The accidents in Urban Pipeline Network (UPN) may cause enormous economic loss and serious threats to society and environment. The daily operation and maintenance of UPN is usually associated with many aspects of data. How to take full advantage of these multi-source data in combination with advanced data mining techniques to assess the post-event risk of pipeline accidents is of great significance to management of resilient urban systems. This work first summarizes the factors affecting accident consequence of gas UPN and establishes the risk evaluation indicators. A traditional risk assessment model based on the Kent index method and the analytic hierarchy process is then employed to determine the relative risk value of each pipeline. To reduce the dependency on experts’ subjective judgements or calculation of probability events in a Bayes decision procedure, a data-driven model based on graph embedding and clustering algorithm is proposed. The Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) technique is used to extract the topological features of pipeline network as a complement to the common attribute features considering the top pipelines usually bear comparable level of risks. A case study on a real gas pipeline network consisting of more than 6500 pipelines verifies the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Application of the Water–Energy–Food Nexus Approach to the Climate-Resilient Water Safety Plan of Leh Town, India

Climate-resilient water safety plans (CR-WSPs) have been developed as a risk-based approach to ensure a safe drinking-water supply while addressing the increasing stress on water resources resulting from climate change. Current examples of the application of CR-WSPs show a strong sectoral approach that fails to explore the potential synergies between other climate-sensitive sectors related to water, such as food and energy. This can increase the vulnerability or decrease the overall resilience of urban systems when planning climate change adaptation measures. In this work, the Water–Energy–Food (WEF) Nexus approach was applied in the formulation of a CR-WSP in Leh Town, India, a city with rapid development and population growth located in the Himalayas—one of the most sensitive ecosystems to climate change. The WEF Nexus approach was applied in the system description using a critical infrastructure approach and in the formulation of scenarios for risk management which exploited intersectoral synergies through water reclamation with resource recovery using constructed wetlands. The improvements in WEF security and risk reduction were demonstrated through indicators and risk mapping with geographical information systems (GISs). The methods for integrating the WEF Nexus approach in CR-WSPs provided through this work can serve as a base for a trans-sectoral, resilient approach within risk-based approaches for water security.

Long-Term Development of Urban Agriculture: Resilience and Sustainability of Farmers Facing the Covid-19 Pandemic in Japan

The coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic has forced global food systems to face unprecedented uncertain shocks even in terms of human health. Urban agriculture is expected to be more resilient because of its short supply chain for urban people and diversified farming activities. However, the short-and long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on urban farms remain unclear. This study aims to reveal the conditions for farm resilience to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the relationship between short-term farm resilience and long-term farm development using data from a survey of 74 farms located in Tokyo. The results are as follows. First, more than half of the sample farms increased their farm sales during this period. This resilience can be called the “persistence” approach. Second, short-term farm resilience and other sustainable farm activities contributed to improving farmers’ intentions for long-term farm development and farmland preservation. Third, the most important resilience attributes were the direct marketing, entrepreneurship, and social networks of farmers. We discussed the necessity of building farmers’ transformative capabilities for a more resilient urban farming system. These results imply that support to enhance the short-term resilience of urban farms is worth more than the short-term profit of the farms.

Framework for modeling interdependencies between households, businesses, and infrastructure system, and their response to disruptions—application

Understanding the impact of disruptions to infrastructure systems, households, and businesses is critical to assess resilience of urban systems. However, modeling these complex interdependent systems and applying these models to real-world areas and disruption scenarios is challenging. To address these challenges, we present a workflow for application of a framework for modeling interdependencies between households, businesses, and infrastructure systems, and their impact on disruptions. Furthermore, we identify challenges in applying this framework to an area of Singapore and analyze the resulting cost of 8 disruption scenarios using metrics that we described. Our results showed and confirmed that our model and the devised metrics can be used to assess resilience of systems. In particular, they showed that the multi-system failures have the largest impact on urban areas, and that disruptions affect small vulnerable areas disproportionately. Moreover, they revealed that disruptions to utility systems were costlier than to easily reconfigurable businesses or transportation networks. We also identified and outlined key factors influencing application of the framework to an urban area. We identified some areas for future research focused on investigating a larger set of urban areas and systems.

Assessment methods of urban system resilience: From the perspective of complex adaptive system theory

With the continuous development of urbanization, and increasing uncertainties and risks, resilience has become an important criterion for urban safety. As a dynamic and open spatial system, the urban system presents typical complex features. Thus, the understanding of urban resilience from the perspective of complex systems theory is helpful to achieve a full understanding of the composition and functioning mechanism of urban systems, and to then improve the scientific nature of urban system cognition and research. In this article, the literature on urban resilience is first reviewed, and it is found that the related research on resilience assessment has yielded some assessment methods. Then, based on complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory and combined with its seven basic characteristics, the basic characteristics of complex urban systems are summarized from the perspective of the principle of the urban system action mechanism. On this basis, a framework of complex urban systems is constructed from three aspects, namely the system environment, system elements and system structure, and the assessment methods of the urban system resilience for each aspect are explored. This study not only expands the research on urban system resilience assessment, but also provides a reference for urban safety development and resilience improvement.

Estimation of earthquake damage to urban environments using sparse modeling

For the establishment of precise disaster prevention measures in response to the Nankai megathrust earthquakes predicted to occur in the future, it is necessary to conduct numerous earthquake simulations and evaluate the vulnerability of the urban environment quantitatively. This vulnerability is evaluated on the basis of factors such as the extent of damage from earthquakes, as well as the attributes of residents, urban infrastructure, and systems in the environment. In this study, we propose a sparse modeling (SpM)-based technique for the evaluation of potential damage to urban environments due to Nankai megathrust earthquakes in Japan. As explanatory variables, any variables related to urban environments in Kochi Prefecture are considered. The results show that, unlike the so-called “complex disaster” events, the number of critical variables that characterize damage states when external disaster forces data (e.g. estimated seismic motion and tsunami height) and urban environment data are available is low, regardless of the magnitude of damage. In other words, urban system variables selected for damage states may be extracted as variables indicating vulnerability to earthquake damage. In addition, we evaluated the characteristics of different cities by visualizing the SpM results on a radar chart. The proposed technique is useful for gaining a deeper understanding of the influence of urban environment variables on earthquake damages. Furthermore, it is expected that measures for improving urban system resilience will be explored based on the proposed technique.

Decrease process analysis of urban system resilience based on the extreme flood simulation

Urban flood is growing worldwide due to climate change, rapid urbanization and population increase. Although the concept of resilience is an effective tool to deal with urban flood, urban flood resilience remains difficult to put into practice nowadays. The attenuation process of urban flood control capacity under the influence of flood is still a challenge. And the stage damage of flood resilience is strongly linked with the recovery of urban system to floods. But current studies failed to capture the change characteristic of flood resilience in time stage. Therefore, this study made stage damage analysis based on flood simulation and modelling in Jianye and Gulou District. Results reveal that Jianye has the higher inundated area and exposed population and asset to flood. Gulou shows more resilience to urban flood with flood return periods of 100 years. Moreover, the stage damage curve benefits the comprehensive understanding of loss and recovery process. This study provides a theoretical support for effective adaptive strategy to urban flood.

Pandemic and the planning of resilient cities and regions

The emergence of the coronavirus pandemic motivated this paper, which revisits the nexus of public health and the city, itself a main source of a pandemic which similarly threatens the lives and properties of the world population gradually one glacier at a time: climate change. We argue that pandemics expose both the vulnerability and resilience of the urban system expansively, from rooftop to the region, but also serve as change agents for the planning of resilient cities and regions globally. The discussion of the urban system and the pandemic is comparative, with the recent coronavirus and climate change, a persistent, long-lasting pandemic. The historical and critical review and synthesis of the durable concepts of the urban system at the kernel of the theories and practices of urbanism is highlighted by place matters, cyberspace, density, access, and the city-region. We note the implications for reconfiguring the resilient urban system of the future effectively with pandemic as change agent and the comprehensive plan and its regulatory zoning ordinance as implementation tool.

The third route: Using extreme decentralization to create resilient urban water systems

For much of the world's urban population, centralized treatment plants and pipe networks built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provide homes with water and a means of disposing of the resulting wastewater. Due to the real or perceived inability of existing systems to deliver safe and palatable water, many users apply additional treatment prior to consumption. Where piped water supply is lacking, drinking water is obtained through water vendors at considerable cost. Despite economic inefficiencies and public health risks inherent in these two water supply systems, the high sunk costs of existing water infrastructure along with low returns on investment and the inflexible nature of the institutions involved in water provision have slowed down the diffusion of alternative approaches that may prove to be less expensive, more adaptable and safer than the current system. We advocate a third, complementary route: household-based personalized water systems. Initially, relatively affluent people expecting more functionality and sustainability from water systems will invest in personalized water systems that allow them to tailor their water to their personal preferences. This approach will tap into the tremendous creativity-base of individual users and entrepreneurs, facilitating the type of co-creation that accelerated the rapid development of consumer electronics. Competition among manufacturers and economies of scale that accrue as these systems become more popular will lead to rapid innovation that drives down costs, improves performance and expands access. These solutions complement emerging approaches for sanitation and resource recovery that do not rely upon sewers for the management of human waste.

Increasing green infrastructure-based ecological resilience in urban systems: A perspective from locating ecological and disturbance sources in a resource-based city

Maintaining the sustainability of the ecosystem in an ever-changing environment and enabling it to continuously provide services for human beings has become the focus of managers. Resilience is considered the key to maintaining the sustainability of an ecosystem. This paper combines source-sink landscape theory, on the basis of considering ecological processes, and builds a framework of factors that affect the ecological resilience of resource-based cities. We used Wu’an, a typical resource-based city, as the study area, and identified the ecological and disturbance sources to determine the ecological resilience. Green infrastructure (GI), as a kind of ecological infrastructure, plays a critical role in growing resilience. Our study established ecological corridors using the minimum cumulative resistance (MCR) model. And then provides a way in time and space to improve resilience based on corridors' internal and external conditions. Moreover, in the context of development where ecological protection is a priority and construction land expansion are limited, this method can assist government decision-making and serve to delineate the boundaries of urban development and the scope of mining activities.

Towards climate resilient urban energy systems: a review.

Climate change and increased urban population are two major concerns for society. Moving towards more sustainable energy solutions in the urban context by integrating renewable energy technologies supports decarbonizing the energy sector and climate change mitigation. A successful transition also needs adequate consideration of climate change including extreme events to ensure the reliable performance of energy systems in the long run. This review provides an overview of and insight into the progress achieved in the energy sector to adapt to climate change, focusing on the climate resilience of urban energy systems. The state-of-the-art methodology to assess impacts of climate change including extreme events and uncertainties on the design and performance of energy systems is described and discussed. Climate resilience is an emerging concept that is increasingly used to represent the durability and stable performance of energy systems against extreme climate events. However, it has not yet been adequately explored and widely used, as its definition has not been clearly articulated and assessment is mostly based on qualitative aspects. This study reveals that a major limitation in the state-of-the-art is the inadequacy of climate change adaptation approaches in designing and preparing urban energy systems to satisfactorily address plausible extreme climate events. Furthermore, the complexity of the climate and energy models and the mismatch between their temporal and spatial resolutions are the major limitations in linking these models. Therefore, few studies have focused on the design and operation of urban energy infrastructure in terms of climate resilience. Considering the occurrence of extreme climate events and increasing demand for implementing climate adaptation strategies, the study highlights the importance of improving energy system models to consider future climate variations including extreme events to identify climate resilient energy transition pathways.

Toward a Framework for Resilience Assessments: Working Across Cultures, Disciplines, and Scales in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Resilience appears within diverse literatures across the physical and social sciences, pervades social and ecological systems models and has been mobilised in the quest to change environmental practices at local and international levels. Yet common language is needed to enable cross-disciplinary conversations. We discuss a novel interdisciplinary process identifying shared terminology and developing a framework to facilitate the integration of physical and social science understandings of urban infrastructure and resilience in urban systems. Drawing on bicultural knowledge traditions unique to Aotearoa/New Zealand, we reflect on resilience as a system property having ecological, social, economic and technical dimensions that influence wellbeing and sustainability outcomes. .

An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health

Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of urban health and wellbeing sustainably have often been implicitly biased by ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centered.’ With increasing urban populations and increasing urban system interconnectivity, many cities have transformed into city regions or clusters, and the external effects of urban growth are carried mainly by the marginalized and the environment putting urban health increasingly at risk. Here we address the question of why human societies have not been better at collectively adapting to the challenges of urbanization and global environmental change? We build a theoretical framework of multi-level selection, complex systems evolution, and governance, following which we then present ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-centered’ ideas of urban development as expressions of two types of socio-political organization with different degrees of self-organization. We found several reasons for which the maladies of current urban development emerged and the seeming inability to resolve them. First, urban systems became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms, displaying preference to sustain themselves as a whole rather than their subordinates. Second, the difference in scaling effects between the biological and the social network contributed to the mismatch between rapid urban growth and slow adaptation. Furthermore, institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism and promoting invasive and exploitative exponential growth, but they also reduce the creativity and resilience of urban systems. We also found that both the “human-scale” and the “people-centered” approaches acknowledge the exponential growth and decreasing variety in urban systems, and advocate for correcting the mismatches. To incorporate people's needs and values for long-term, truly sustainable urban health governance, we recommend combining the self-organizing, evolutionary feature of “human-scale” and the coordinative, political feature of “people-centeredness.”

Resilience Capacity Planning: A Strategy Requirement for Vernacular Architecture Existences as a part of Sustainable Development in Lampung

Facing vulnerability of vernacular architecture existences, resilience capacity planning is involved as a strategic requirement for new established ecosystems of human settlement. Resilient capacity planning concept implementation will help local community to reduce impact of climate change and disaster risk, and also increase safety management. The research is intended to measure the resilience of urban system according to sustainable development for historical heritage and resilient approach that has applied in vernacular settlement. Vernacular architecture of Lampung is a suitable example for this research. Lampung is an area that has multi-culture acculturation, which is seen, in the social system of society, cultural patterns, building typologies and traditional settlement patterns. On the other hand, vernacular architecture of Lampung provides outstanding shelter from climate change and disaster risk, meets the requirements of local food security, where the development adjusts the cultural landscape, the potential of food sources and other natural resources. In addition, the development process also uses local technology and construction that adapts the environment and its location to ease the production land. However, there is much vernacular architecture, which have high socio-cultural potential and are not identified by academic researchers. By studying architectural vernacular, we not only repeat the way of life of the past, but also as a first step to create new technologies and designs in the future by learning the knowledge and technology applied in the past especially in Lampung. In this paper, researcher takes lead by conducting a review of important part of the existence of vernacular architecture to conduct resilience capacity planning strategy as a part of sustainable development in Lampung.