Resilient urban planning: Major principles and criteria

摘要

The notion of resilience is rapidly gaining ground in the urban sustainability literature. The frequency of recentincidents including natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes, and also difficulties caused by theeconomic downturn has highlighted the vulnerability of human settlements and makes the appropriate considerationof resilience in the planning for future of urban areas of vital significance. Development of an assessment frameworkfor evaluating the extent of resiliency of urban areas can be an effective way of incorporating resiliency-related issuesinto the urban planning process. For this purpose, it is necessary to clarify the implications of the resilience conceptfor the sustainability of urban areas. It is also important to identify resilience-related principles and criteria thatshould be embedded in the framework for assessing the resiliency of urban environments. This study involves aninitial review of the literature on resilience and urban sustainability to extract a comprehensive set of criteria that canbe used to develop an urban resilience assessment system. Moreover, it tries to design a conceptual framework,illustrative of the inter-relations between these various set of criteria. Criteria for assessment of the resilience of urbanareas are divided into several main themes that cover environmental, economic, social, and institutional dimensionsof sustainability. These themes would further be broken down into major criteria to account for important relevantareas such as land use, infrastructure, health, etc.The output of this study can be used as the basis for defining a set of precise indicators that will constitute a potentialassessment tool for measuring the resilience of urban developments. The resilient assessment process has the capacityto provide decision makers with a clear and comprehensive picture of the resilience of the development proposal andsupports them in making better informed decisions.