scholarly journals Hazards, Infrastructure Networks and Unspecific Resilience

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 4972
Author(s):  
Nabil Touili
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Food Supply ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Electric Energy ◽  
Critical Infrastructures ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Seine River ◽  
Urban Services ◽  
River Flood ◽  
Energy Transportation

The aim of this paper is to provide a framework to improve urban resilience independently of the nature of the disturbances. Recent disasters had a significant impact on critical infrastructures providing essential urban services such as energy, transportation, telecommunication, water and food supply or health care. Indeed, several natural and human-made hazards may lead to disruptions, and most critical infrastructures are networked and highly interdependent. Henceforth, resilience building remain focused on specific hazards or on improving the resilience, separately, of single infrastructures. In order to enhance urban resilience, this paper is based on learnings from three case studies that are the 2001 WTC terrorist attack, hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 and the 2016 Seine river flood in Paris. These events highlight disruptions to urban services, but also some resilience options. In light of both the literature and our case studies, a framework of unspecific resilience is provided for improving some resilience principles, namely omnivory, redundancy, buffering, high flux, homeostasis and flatness within electric energy, water and food supply and transportation networks. Rebuilding resilience within this framework is further discussed with respect to all kinds of disruptive events.

scholarly journals Climate risks, digital media, and big data: following communication trails to investigate urban communities' resilience

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (7) ◽  
pp. 1485-1498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Vicari ◽  
Ioulia Tchiguirinskaia ◽  
Bruno Tisserand ◽  
Daniel Schertzer
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Visual Observation ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Seine River ◽  
Incidence Graph ◽  
River Flood ◽  
Key Terms

Abstract. Today, when extreme weather affects an urban area, huge numbers of digital data are spontaneously produced by the population on the Internet. These “digital trails” can provide insight into the interactions existing between climate-related risks and the social perception of these risks. According to this research “big data” exploration techniques can be exploited to monitor these interactions and their effect on urban resilience. The experiments presented in this paper show that digital research can amplify key issues covered by digital media and identify the stakeholders that can influence the debate, and therefore the community's attitudes towards an issue. Three corpora of Web communication data have been extracted: press articles covering the June 2016 Seine River flood, press articles covering the October 2015 Alpes-Maritimes flood, and tweets on the 2016 Seine River flood. The analysis of these datasets involved an iteration between manual and automated extraction of hundreds of key terms, aggregated analysis of publication incidence and key term incidence, graph representations based on measures of semantic proximity (conditional distance) between key terms, automated visualisation of clusters through Louvain modularity, visual observation of the graph, and quantitative analysis of its nodes and edges. Through this analysis we detected topics and actors that characterise each press dataset, as well as frequent co-occurrences and clusters of topics and actors. Profiling of social media users gave us insights into who could influence opinions on Twitter. Through a comparison of the three datasets, it was also possible to observe how some patterns change over time, in different urban areas and in different digital media contexts.

scholarly journals Climate risks, digital media, and big data: following communication trails to investigate urban communities' resilience

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Vicari ◽  
Ioulia Tchiguirinskaia ◽  
Daniel Schertzer
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Visual Observation ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Seine River ◽  
Climate Risks ◽  
River Flood ◽  
Key Terms

Abstract. Nowadays, when extreme weather affects an urban area, huge amounts of digital data are spontaneously produced by the population on the Internet. These digital trails can provide an insight on the interactions existing between climate related risks and the social perception of these risks. According to this research big data exploration techniques can be exploited to monitor these interactions and their effect on urban resilience. The experiments presented in this paper show that digital research can bring out the most central issues in the digital media, identify the stakeholders that have the capacity to influence the debate and, therefore, the community attitudes towards an issue. Three corpora of Web communication data have been extracted: press news covering the June 2016 Seine River flood; press news covering the October 2015 Alpes-Maritimes flood; tweets on the 2016 Seine River flood. The analysis of these datasets involves an iteration between manual and automated extraction of hundreds of key terms, network representations based on key terms co-occurrences, automated cluster visualisation based on adjacency matrix, and profiling of social media users. Visual observation of the network coupled to quantitative analysis of its nodes and edges allow obtaining an in-depth understanding of the most prominent topics and actors, as well as of the connections and clusters that these topics and actors tend to form in the journalistic sphere. Through a comparison of the three datasets, it is also possible to observe how these patterns change over time, in different urban areas and in different digital media contexts.

scholarly journals Urban Risks and Resilience

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-211
Author(s):  
Susan L. Cutter
Keyword(s):  
Adverse Events ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Mitigation Strategies ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Building Capacity ◽  
Urban Informatics ◽  
The Past ◽  
End Point ◽  
Point Versus

AbstractThe resilience concept has become more significant in the past decade as a means for understanding how cities prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Definitional differences—resilience as an outcome or end-point versus resilience as a process of building capacity—dominate the literature. Lagging behind are efforts to systematically measure resilience to produce a baseline and subsequent monitoring, in order to gauge what, where, and how intervention or mitigation strategies would strengthen or weaken urban resilience. The chapter reviews research and practitioner attempts to develop urban informatics for resilience and provides selected case studies of cities as exemplars.

Models, Methods, and Metrics to Measure Socioeconomic Resilience

2018 ◽  
pp. 346-367
Author(s):  
Carlos Gonçalves
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Systems ◽  
Economic Base ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Regional Context ◽  
The Social ◽  
Indicator Matrix ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter aims to discuss concepts and methods to measure the landscape resilience of urban systems and test the indicators framework in the Portuguese regional context. The objective is to measure the performance and the direction of the urban changes in different phenomena, as well as to evaluate the level of urban systems preparation for a desired and undesired change adaptability. The approach to these issues is analyzed in the literature, dividing the aforementioned analysis into the resilience of the economic base, of the social structure, and of the urban form. In brief, the chapter meets three objectives: firstly, defining the framework of principles more commonly associated with urban resilience; secondly, providing a selection of indicators that embodies the different proposals of measurement; and thirdly, applying the indicator matrix to two Portuguese case studies (Caldas da Rainha and Évora urban systems).

SCADA Systems Cyber Security for Critical Infrastructures

2020 ◽  
pp. 446-464
Author(s):  
Suhaila Ismail ◽  
Elena Sitnikova ◽  
Jill Slay
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Data Acquisition ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cyber Security ◽  
Cyber Attacks ◽  
Critical Infrastructures ◽  
Physical Injury ◽  
The Public ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Scada Systems

Past cyber-attacks on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems for Critical infrastructures have left these systems compromised and caused financial and economic problems. Deliberate attacks have resulted in denial of services and physical injury to the public in certain cases. This study explores the past attacks on SCADA Systems by examining nine case studies across multiple utility sectors including transport, energy and water and sewage sector. These case studies will be further analysed according to the cyber-terrorist decision-making theories including strategic, organisational and psychological theories based on McCormick (2000). Next, this study will look into cyber-terrorist capabilities in conducting attacks according to Nelson's (1999) approach that includes simple-unstructured, advance-structured and complex-coordinated capabilities. The results of this study will form the basis of a guideline that organisations can use so that they are better prepared in identifying potential future cybersecurity attacks on their SCADA systems.

scholarly journals Critical Infrastructures: The Operational Environment in Cases of Severe Disruption

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 838 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ossi Heino ◽  
Annina Takala ◽  
Pirjo Jukarainen ◽  
Joanna Kalalahti ◽  
Tuula Kekki ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Emergency Services ◽  
Critical Infrastructure ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Critical Infrastructures ◽  
Operational Environment ◽  
Electricity Grid ◽  
Operational Conditions ◽  
Key Stakeholders ◽  
Administrative Structures

The functioning and resilience of modern societies have become more and more dependent on critical infrastructures. Severe disturbance to critical infrastructure is likely to reveal chaotic operational conditions, in which infrastructure service providers, emergency services, police, municipalities, and other key stakeholders must act effectively to minimize damages and restore normal operations. This paper aims to better understand this kind of operational environment resulting from, for example, a terrorist attack. It emphasizes mutual interdependencies among key stakeholders in such situations. The empirical contribution is based on observations from a workshop, in which participants representing the critical services and infrastructures in Finland discussed in thematic groups. Two scenarios guided the workshop discussions; nationwide electricity grid disruption and presumably intentionally contaminated water supply in a city. The results indicate that more attention should be paid to the interdependencies between critical infrastructures, as well as to the latent vulnerabilities hidden inside the systems. Furthermore, producing security seems to require continuous interaction and creation of meanings between extremely different actors and logics. This implies a need for changes in thinking, particularly concerning the ability to define problems across conventional administrative structures, geographical boundaries and conferred powers.

scholarly journals Methodology to Prioritize Climate Adaptation Measures in Urban Areas. Barcelona and Bristol Case Studies

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 4807 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Guerrero-Hidalga ◽  
Eduardo Martínez-Gomariz ◽  
Barry Evans ◽  
James Webber ◽  
Montserrat Termes-Rifé ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Climate Adaptation ◽  
Extreme Rainfall ◽  
Extreme Weather Events ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Adaptation Measures ◽  
Welfare Impacts ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Detailed Assessment

In the current context of fast innovation in the field of urban resilience against extreme weather events, it is becoming more challenging for decision-makers to recognize the most beneficial adaptation measures for their cities. Detailed assessment of multiple measures is resource-consuming and requires specific expertise, which is not always available. To tackle these issues, in the context of the H2020 project RESCCUE (RESilience to cope with Climate Change in Urban arEas), a methodology to effectively prioritize adaptation measures against extreme rainfall-related hazards in urban areas has been developed. It follows a multi-phase structure to progressively narrow down the list of potential measures. It begins using less resource-intensive techniques, to finally focus on the in-depth analysis on a narrower selection of measures. It involves evaluation of risks, costs, and welfare impacts, with strong focus on stakeholders’ participation through the entire process. The methodology is adaptable to different contexts and objectives and has been tested in two case studies across Europe, namely Barcelona and Bristol.

scholarly journals The Importance of the Participatory Dimension in Urban Resilience Improvement Processes

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
pp. 7305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria LopezDeAsiain ◽  
Vicente Díaz-García
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Economic ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Future Development ◽  
Circular Economy ◽  
Urban Regeneration ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Regeneration Processes

This article discusses the approach adopted by the researchers into citizen participation in urban regeneration actions and projects. It describes the concepts of sustainability and habitability in relation to the urban environment and architecture within the framework of improving the resilience of our cities through the circular economy and decarbonisation processes in architecture. The authors review the participatory dimension of different urban regeneration actions carried out in Spain and the impact of this dimension on the results obtained by environmental, economic and social urban improvements. They then define possible strategies and methodological tools for integrating this dimension into traditional urban regeneration processes. The article presents case studies and their specific characteristics, and draws conclusions about their effectiveness and relevance. It also compares citizen-led interventions with interventions led by public administrations. Lastly, the authors analyse the potential reasons for success in these processes and projects, identifying weaknesses and proposing possible strategies for future development by researchers.

scholarly journals Integrated Assessment of Climate Change Impacts and Urban Resilience: From Climate and Hydrological Hazards to Risk Analysis and Measures

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 6430
Author(s):  
Marc Velasco ◽  
Beniamino Russo ◽  
Eduardo Martínez-Gomariz
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Urban Resilience ◽  
Urban Services ◽  
Hydrological Hazards ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Resilience Management ◽  
Work Done

This Special Issue brings together recent research findings related to urban resilience, in particular taking into account climate change impacts and hydrological hazards. Taking advantage of the work done in the H2020 RESCCUE project, 12 different papers dealing with several issues related to the resilience of urban areas have been published. Due to the complexity of cities, urban resilience management is one of the key challenges that our societies have to deal with in the near future. In addition, urban resilience is a transversal and multi-sectorial issue, affecting different urban services, several hazards, and all the steps of the risk management cycle. This is precisely why the papers contained in this Special Issue focus on varied subjects, such as impact assessments, urban resilience assessments, adaptation strategies, flood risk and urban services, always focusing on at least two of these topics.

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