Resilience, Space Syntax and Spatial Interfaces: the case of River cities

Abstract

Resilience defined as the capacity of a system to manage impacts, keep its efficiency and continue its development has been scrutinized by researchers from different points of view over the past decades. Due to the prominence of resilience in urban planning, this paper intends to find out how the spatial structure of cities deals with disturbances, and if geographical phenomena such as rivers affect the resilience in cities. Using the space syntax methods syntactically analyze the resilience in cities, we innovatively introduce two measures; similarity and sameness. These measures are in relation with the syntactical properties of cities and compare the degree of resilience between different groups. Similarity measures the degree to which each city retains the relative magnitude of its foreground network after a disturbance and sameness is the degree to which each city retains the same segments as its foreground network after a disturbance. Likewise to network resilience studies, we apply different disturbances on cities and explore the reaction of cities to disturbances in terms of size of the foreground network and which segments are parts thereof. We then compare different groups based on these measurements as a method to analyze sameness and similarity. The results show that the resilience, in the way we define it, is different in different cities depending on in which view and based on which parameters we are discussing the resilience. Additionally morphological phenomena such as rivers have a great impact on the structure of cities and in turn on their resilience.

Street Network Resilience Put to the Test: The Dramatic Crash of Genoa and Bologna Bridges

“…The former translates streets into links and intersections into nodes, while the latter-due to its focus on the properties of different road segments-translates streets into nodes and their mutual intersections into graph edges. Abshirini & Koch [34] use a dual-graph model to measure the ability of an urban grid to retain its foreground road network structure (Similarity) and relative composition (Sameness) after a disturbance. Cutini [10] and Cutini & Di Pinto [35] propose using it to retrieve a set of street network resilience indices, suitable to comparatively assess the configurational resilience of different urban grids, while Carpenter [36] adopts it as a basis for mapping community resilience.…”

Assessing Morphological Resilience. Methodological Challenges for Metropolitan Areas

“…or anthropogenic (terrorist attack, industrial accident, etc.). This kind of resilience of urban form has already been studied by a rich scientific literature [ 1 , 8 , 9 , 25 ]. Rather, we are concerned with the potential adaptability and transformability (or, conversely, with the potential fragility) of the present forms of the physical city when confronted with future socioeconomic and technical changes that urban societies constantly produce endogenously [ 17 , 33 , 37 ], for example, in lifestyles, work organization, and use of technology, in the urban space.…”

Flood Resilient Cities: A Syntactic and Metric Novel on Measuring the Resilience of Cities against Flooding, Gothenburg, Sweden

“…In this view, a comparison of geometry of segments forming foreground networks before and after a disturbance can reveal the percentage of the segments remaining the same after disturbance. Sameness differs from zero to one, meaning that a higher percentage of sameness points out to relatively a higher resilience in the structure of the city and vice versa (refer to [18] for details). Figure 4 shows a flowchart illustrating the process of extracting these two measures.…”

“…Given the enhancing use of the term in many different fields such as economy, sociology, networking and engineering the definition and concept of resilience can vary and sometimes is malleable as it can be in contrast to its definition in other disciplines. The main difficulties occur when efforts are devoted to form the concept in order to take the term out of a purely abstract and general form and advance it toward a specific characteristic in a measurable and functional form [18] [4] [19]. However, there are common definitions of resilience in urban planning and disaster management.…”

“…Flood Hazard and urban flooding thus as physical phenomena are influenced by the form of the cities and thus the magnitude of their impacts on urban infrastructures and human lives can be intensified by urban infrastructures such as street networks and buildings [24]. The aim of this research is to measure the resilience of a city against flooding according to the impacts of flooding on the street networks using two different methods; a syntactic measurement of the street networks discussed in space syntax research [27] [30], as its combination with resilience has recently proposed different approaches in assessing resilience, covering a range of possibilities from theory to practice at different scales of built environment from building to urban scale [18] [31] [32] [33]; and a metric measurement of accessibility of the street networks to amenities. In this view, comparing the syntactic properties of the street networks before and after flooding as well as exploring changes in the accessibility of the street networks after flooding are the ways conducted in this research in order to investigate the degree of resilience and vulnerability of the city against flooding.…”