Urban Disaster Resilience and Security Addressing Risks in Societies Preface

Abstract

PART 1 - Science-Policy Nexus Perspectives -- Management of a city - demands on decision-makers and operational institutions -- Challenges of both quantitative and qualitative methods to address built environment vulnerability and resilience -- Management of a city - demands on decision-makers and operational institutions -- From information to knowledge: the role of knowledge for urban resilience and crisis management -- Information provision and consulting communities about climate change and risks: an integrated critical infrastructure risk and resilience concept in the context of extreme weather and global change -- Opportunities of indicator-based operationalisations of resilience for urban disaster resilience -- PART 2 Case studies of urban disaster resilience and security -- The Distribution of Vulnerability of Urban Spaces: Residential Segregation and the Subjective Dimension of (Un)Safety -- Interrelations of urbanisation and resilience in dynamic and emerging nations: chances and challenges -- Presumptuousness and measure of a city - Kathmandu as a stage of international resilience efforts.-~Knowledge as enabler of urban infrastructure resilience -- PART 3 ~- Critical perspectives on a scientific advancement on the topic of urban resilience -- Reviews to Part 2 and Replies of the authors -- Is the urban resilience metaphor overstretched? -- Who gets marginalised and sidelined by the urban resilience focus? -- The resilient city - 10 years of research -- Harbour city / airport city -- Smart city / Green city / Science city / Edge city (suburbia) -- Periurban -- An Urban Earthquake Disaster Risk Index.-~PART 4 - Synopsis This edited book investigates the interrelations of disaster impacts, resilience and security in an urban context. Urban as a term captures megacities, cities, and generally, human settlements, that are characterised by concentration of quantifiable and non-quantifiable subjects, objects and value attributions to them. The scope is to narrow down resilience from an all-encompassing concept to applied ways of scientifically attempting to {\glq}measure' this type of disaster related resilience. 28 chapters in this book reflect opportunities and doubts of the disaster risk science community regarding this {\glq}measurability'. Therefore, examples utilising both quantitative and qualitative approaches are juxtaposed. This book concentrates on features that are distinct characteristics of resilience, how they can be measured and in what sense they are different to vulnerability and risk parameters. Case studies in 11 countries either use a hypothetical pre-event estimation of resilience or are addressing a {\grq}revealed resilience' evident and documented after an event. Such information can be helpful to identify benchmarks or margins of impact magnitudes and related recovery times, volumes and qualities of affected populations and infrastructure