This book is on urban resilience - how to design and operate cities that
can withstand major threats such as natural disasters and economic
downturns and how to recover from them. It is a collection of latest
research results from two separate but collaborating research groups,
namely, researchers in urban design and those on general resilience
theory. The book systematically deals with the core aspects of urban
resilience: systems, management issues and populations.
The taxonomy can be broken down into threats, systems, resilience cycles
and recovery types in the context of urban resilience. It starts with a
discussion of systems resilience models, focusing on the central idea
that resilience is a moving average of costs (a set of trajectories in a
two-player game paradigm). The second section explores management
issues, including planning, operating and emergency response in cities
with specific examples such as land-use planning and carbon-neutral
scenarios for urban planning. The next section focuses on urban dwellers
and specific people-related issues in the context of resilience.
Agent-based simulation of behaviour and perception-based resilience, as
well as brand crisis management are representative examples of the
topics discussed. A further section examines systems like public
utilities - including managing power supplies, cyber-security issues and
models for pandemics. It concludes with a discussion of the future
challenges and risks facing complex systems, for example in resilient
power grids, making it essential reading for a wide range of researchers
and policymakers.