Morphology Dependent Assessment of Resilience for Urban Areas

The formation of new threats and the increasing complexity of urban built infrastructures underline the need for more robust and sustainable systems, which are able to cope with adverse events. Achieving sustainability requires the strengthening of resilience. Currently, a comprehensive approach for the quantification of resilience of urban infrastructure is missing. Within this paper, a new generalized mathematical framework is presented. A clear definition of terms and their interaction builds the basis of this resilience assessment scheme. Classical risk-based as well as additional components are aligned along the timeline before, during and after disruptive events, to quantify the susceptibility, the vulnerability and the response and recovery behavior of complex systems for multiple threat scenarios. The approach allows the evaluation of complete urban surroundings and enables a quantitative comparison with other development plans or cities. A comprehensive resilience framework should cover at least preparation, prevention, protection, response and recovery. The presented approach determines respective indicators and provides decision support, which enhancement measures are more effective. Hence, the framework quantifies for instance, if it is better to avoid a hazardous event or to tolerate an event with an increased robustness. An application example is given to assess different urban forms, i.e., morphologies, with consideration of multiple adverse events, like terrorist attacks or earthquakes, and multiple buildings. Each urban object includes a certain number of attributes, like the object use, the construction type, the time-dependent number of persons and the value, to derive different performance targets. The assessment results in the identification of weak spots with respect to single resilience indicators. Based on the generalized mathematical formulation and suitable combination of indicators, this approach can quantify the resilience of urban morphologies, independent of possible single threat types and threat locations.