Urban Resilience: A Civil Engineering Perspective

Abstract

Abstract:The concept of resilience is used in multiple scientific contexts, being understood according to several different perspectives. Essentially, resilience identifies the capability to recover, absorb shocks, and restore equilibrium after a perturbation. Recently, resilience is triggering increasing interest in engineering contexts, referring to communities and urban networked systems, as the capability to recover from natural disasters. The approach to the engineering resilience dates back to the early 1980s, when Timmerman defined resilience as "the ability of human communities to withstand external shocks or perturbations to their infrastructure and to recover from such perturbations". In this paper, a literature review of the existing methodologies to quantify urban resilience is presented according to a civil engineering perspective. Different approaches, for diverse applications, are examined and discussed. A particular focus is done on the studies from Cavallaro et al. and Bozza et al., approaching disaster resilience of urban environments to natural hazards according to the complex networks theory.

Investigating the Impact of Governmental Governance on Megaproject Performance: Evidence From China

“…The highest loading is the presence of designed authorities (SRM62), followed by presence of a disaster risk assessment plan (SRM63). The results match those observed in earlier studies (Bozza et al, 2017;Vahanvati & Mulligan, 2017). Setting strategic and tactical goals of sustainability is one of the main strategies advocated by the government agency (Aarseth et al, 2017).…”

“…Setting strategic and tactical goals of sustainability is one of the main strategies advocated by the government agency (Aarseth et al, 2017). Lower factor loadings are "presence of emergency rescue system" (0.889) and "ability to determine the disaster prioritization" (0.884), which represent projects' response and their capability to deal more successfully with occurrence of risk, accident or disaster (Bozza et al, 2017). Although learning mechanism got the lowest factor loading (0.857), it is essential for improving response speed as emergency arise.…”

Research on the Rational Yield Ratio of Isolation System and Its Application to the Design of Seismically Isolated Reinforced Concrete Frame-Core Tube Tall Buildings

“…To identify the rational yield ratio for the RC frame-core tube tall buildings located in high seismic regions, the following two principles are followed: (1) the horizontal seismic absorbing coefficient, β, is required to be no more than 0.38 as specified in the GB50011-2010 [17]; (2) the MBD under the MCE should not exceed 540 mm. In consideration of the difficulties in design of such seismically isolated tall buildings, the committee recommended that the limit width of the isolation gap could increase to 650 mm, which meant that the MBD could raise to approximate 540 mm (i.e., 650/1.2 ≈ 540 mm).…”

“…In recent years, studies on the resilience-based seismic design of next-generation cities have attracted much attention in earthquake engineering [1][2][3][4]. To achieve a seismically resilient city, it is essential to improve the seismic resilience of important buildings that can highly affect the normal operation of the city, such as the government buildings, hospitals and telecommunications buildings, which are usually constructed using reinforced concrete (RC) tall structure.…”

Planning Emergency Shelters for Urban Disaster Resilience: An Integrated Location-Allocation Modeling Approach

“…Romero-Lankao et al [5] synthesize the concept of urban sustainability and resilience from theory and practice, and examine the implications of their intersections and differences. Bozza et al [6] discuss the resilience of urban environments to natural hazards from a civil engineering perspective and seek to quantify urban resilience. Moreover, to make a city resilient, it should be focus on preparedness for future hazards.…”