Addressing social inclusion within urban resilience: A system dynamics approach

Abstract

Cities are afflicted by different stresses and shocks that make urban systems exposed to a high level of uncertainty. Global community is interested in enhancing urban resilience to make cities able to respond and adapt to these circumstances. Urban resilience is a complex, evolutionary and multidimensional approach to design and manage cities. Furthermore, urban systems have to own some specific characteristics to reach or maintain their resilience, among which the inclusivity. One of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is focused on making cities safer, resilient and inclusive. Inclusivity embraces all urban resilience and city dimensions and its analysis and assessment are very complicated. This paper developed a System Dynamics Model to analyse how the level of inclusivity can change over time concerning to the stresses that afflict the socio-economic conditions of the population. The objective of this investigation is to highlight the connection between inclusivity and the vulnerable population, considering its importance in urban resilience enhancing. This approach has been applied to investigate the inclusivity of the city of Turin (Italy). The final challenge of this application is developing an evaluation approach able to predict the possible conditions of the urban systems in the future. The aim of this research is providing an evaluation tool with these characteristics to support the definition of strategies to enhance urban resilience within the assessment of the resilience capacities.