Urban Resilience Assessment: Multiple Dimensions, Criteria, and Indicators

Over the past few years, there has been a proliferation of studies that focus on enhancing resilience of cities against a multitude of man-made and natural disasters. There has also been an increase in the number of frameworks and tools developed for assessing urban resilience. As climate change advances, resilience will become an even more significant topic in the science and policy circles that influence future urban development. Resilience indicators, in particular, will be essential for helping planners and decision makers understand where their communities stand in terms of resilience and develop strategies and action plans for creating more resilient cities. This chapter draws on the extensive literature on urban resilience assessment and provides a set of principles and indicators that can be used for developing an urban resilience assessment tool. Selected indicators cover multiple dimensions of urban resilience. They are divided into five main categories, namely, materials and environmental resources, society and well-being, economy, built environment and infrastructure, and governance and institutions. It is argued that resilience indicators should be used to help planners understand how best to enhance the abilities to plan/prepare for, absorb, recover, and adapt to disruptive events. The chapter concludes with proposing a matrix to relate resilience indicators with the main underlying characteristics of urban resilience that are namely, robustness, stability, flexibility, resourcefulness, redundancy, coordination capacity, diversity, foresight capacity, independence, connectivity, collaboration, agility, adaptability, self-organization, creativity, efficiency, and equity.