Towards Resilient Rotterdam? Key conditions for a networked approach to managing urban infrastructure risks

Abstract

Critical infrastructures are increasingly recognized to be playing important roles in urban resilience theory and practice. However, little is known about which governance challenges result from making them an integral part of urban resilience policies and what role city administrations play or could play in the resulting governance arrangements. We address these shortcomings in the scholarly literature by analysing the case of the Dutch city of Rotterdam, which has positioned itself as a front runner with regard to urban resilience. We find that the city administration is limited in its authority and depends on decisions made by other public and private actors, particularly those relating to the integrated management of interconnected infrastructure networks such as those for water and energy provision. We therefore argue that institutionalizing resilience will strongly depend on city administrations’ institutional capacity to manage networks more effectively. For this, we derive key conditions for institutional adjustments in current governance arrangements. Necessary adjustments include redefining roles and responsibilities for cross‐territorial risk management, cross‐sectoral and cross‐departmental budgeting of resilience measures, and integrating local actions and measures with those at regional and national levels of government. Our conclusions call for national and supranational legal reforms to establish uniform procedural rules for urban risk management and contingency planning to provide guidance for municipalities on how to enhance the resilience of their cities and infrastructures.

Systematization of Sustainable Urbanized Landscapes for Happiness and Quality of Life

“…To date, construction in water areas is prohibited in Ukraine, which certainly helps to preserve natural landscaping in these areas. A striking example is a coastal strip in Odesa, which contains many trees and shrubs [47][48][49][50].…”

A Systematic Literature Review of Infrastructure Governance: Cross-sectoral Lessons for Transformative Governance Approaches

“…Mega-projects are typically criticised in the literature for their lack of transparency and democratic control (Harris 2017), and for technocratic and populist approaches that generate a politics of consensus, obscuring the role of ideology in infrastructure planning and strategy (Jessop 2002;Keil 2002). Most associations between the PPP and infrastructure network theme relate to privatised influence over infrastructure network effectiveness, or potential conditions for effectiveness such as strong institutional arrangements (Bolt 2011;Dolla and Laishram 2020;Huck et al 2021;McLean 2018;Musonda 2018).…”

Resilience in the management and business research field: a bibliometric analysis

“…In the organizational resilience (or resilience in organizations) line of research, there is a tendency to address, compound, or associate resilience with other topics. Some articles mapped in the co-citations network go in this direction (e.g., Fiksel et al, 2015;Williams et al, 2017) as well as more recent works from 2020/2021-May (Adekola & Clelland, 2020;Huck et al, 2021;Kaplan, 2020). In this line of research, some avenues for theoretical and empirical studies are also observed.…”