Urban resilience in the making? The governance of critical infrastructures in German cities

Abstract

Over the last decade, the protection of urban infrastructures has become a focus in German security policies. These point not solely to the multiple external infrastructural threats (e.g. natural disasters, terrorist and cyber-attacks), but also to the endogenous risks of cascading failures across geographical and functional borders that arise from interlocking and often mutually dependent infrastructures. As geographical nodes in infrastructurally mediated flows, cities are considered to be particularly vulnerable to infrastructure breakdowns. Their capability to prevent and to prepare for infrastructural failures, and thus to manage infrastructural interdependencies, is seen as a major prerequisite for resilient societies. However, as our article demonstrates, the institutional capacity of the local authorities and utility companies for risk mitigation and preparedness is limited. Drawing on qualitative research in selected German cities, we argue that the governance of critical infrastructures involves considerable challenges: it overarches different, often fragmented, policy domains and territories and institutionally unbundled utility (sub-) domains. Moreover, risk mitigation and preparedness are usually not based on experience from past events, but on destructive scenarios. They involve considerable uncertainty and contestations among local decision-makers. Interviews with local experts indicate that effective governance of critical infrastructures requires more regulatory efforts by national policies. At the same time, they point to the need for identifying and assessing place-based vulnerabilities, for defining locally differentiated mitigation and preparedness strategies and for the training of local utility companies as well as crisis management.

Enhancing urban and infrastructure resilience

“…Referring to 'systems within a city', the definition draws an explicit link to -among others -urban infrastructure systems. This is in line with current scholarship pointing out the crucial role of technical infrastructures both for causing or accelerating the great challenges of the 21 st century and for dealing with them (Labaka et al, 2015;Monstadt and Schmidt, 2019).…”

“…Thirdly, cities around the world are growing continuously, with more than half of the world's population now living in urban areas (United Nations, 2019). High population densities, the concentration of economic activity in cities, dense built-up environments as well as the high concentration of infrastructure networks make cities more vulnerable to natural hazards and other types of threat (Godschalk, 2003;Monstadt and Schmidt, 2019). Fourthly, our world is becoming more and more globalised and our cities are becoming more and more connected through economic relations and infrastructurally mediated flows of production material, knowledge and people (Lechner and Boli, 2019).…”

“…Whilst early attempts to conceptualise urban resilience describe cities as socio-ecological systems (Lebel et al, 2006), scholars have recently made use of a socio-technical system understanding (Amir, 2018) or have combined both perspectives into social-ecological-technical systems (Markolf et al, 2018). In fact, the resilience of cities and the resilience of their infrastructure networks and services are inherently intertwined (Marana et al, 2018b;Monstadt and Schmidt, 2019) and awareness of urban vulnerabilities to technical infrastructure failures has grown steadily during recent years (Graham, 2010a;Little, 2010a). However, Hommels (2018) shows that linking social and technical aspects of resilience poses major challenges in policy making and planning practice because different groups of actors dealing with each dimension seldom integrate their work.…”

“…INTRODUCTION major coordination problems. As interdependent infrastructure systems allow risks to migrate across time and space (Münzberg et al, 2017), these authors advocate considering infrastructural interdependencies in risk management practices to enhance resilience (de Bruijne and van Eeten, 2007;Monstadt and Schmidt, 2019). In this vein, the literature often calls for a shift from protectionist towards adaptive risk management approaches in the design of infrastructure resilience policies (GMU, 2007;Medd and Marvin, 2005) and points to the need to create public-private partnerships covering different infrastructure domains (Bach et al, 2014;Dunn-Cavelty and Suter, 2009).…”

Urban Critical Infrastructure’s Governance Framework for Climate Resilient Cities

“…Some of these frameworks introduce methods to carry out an interdependencies analysis as part of the city resilience framework, analysing the cascading effects to avoid major disruptions (Lomba-Fernández et al, 2019). However, many authors agree on the fact that the governance of urban CIs, and in particular the governance of interdependencies, is one of the problems that still need to be solved when developing city resilience (Monstadt & Schmidt, 2019;Romero-Lankao et al, 2018). CIs usually are operated by private companies, for that reason cities need an adequate governance framework and instruments to guarantee the integration of urban CIs networks within the city resilience strategy against CC.…”