Disaster resiliency measurement frameworks state of the art

Abstract

Since adoption of the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015 "Building the resilience of nations and communities to disasters", the concept of disaster resilience has gained a wider interest and has become more popular among academic researchers and practitioners. Although the literature on urban studies and also the practical planning documents recurrently refers to resilience concept as a managerial principle behind making resilient cities and regions, operationalizing this concept in urban and regional planning context raises critical challenges in terms of its determinants and assessment. There exist a number of disaster resiliency frameworks and indicator sets in varying degrees of comprehensiveness, accuracy and validity which offer communities a set of indicators to measure and manage their resiliency in order to preserve their critical structures and functions in the face of disturbances and recover quickly to the desired pre-disaster conditions. This paper presents a critical review of resiliency models in the international urban resilience literature. It starts by defining and individuating the resiliency concept from other similar related concepts in disaster literature. Then it defines a framework for evaluation of resiliency models for aligning it to urban studies discipline, using a number of criteria including comprehensiveness, structure of components and indicator building methods, scale and unit of analysis, dynamics, data requirements, validation and operationality, and actual and potential applications. The paper ends by speculating about the most promising opportunities to further improve the resiliency models in urban context by using a set of resilience attributes which already embedded in the discourse of urban theory to evaluate the resiliency of each city's built environment and the way people have adapted to that built environment to recover following a disaster. The findings suggest that fostering these resilience attributes within different urban components, can potentially assist in the design and planning of resilient cities which have an enhanced capacity to absorb the shock and recover quickly.