How Urban Resilience Can Change Cities: A System Dynamics Model Approach

Abstract

Urban resilience is an emerging approach to planning in cities. In last few decades, this concept has been also used as fundamental principle to set up urban development strategies. Urban resilience is a multi-dimensional and dynamic phenomenon and applied to urban planning it leads to cities being considered as complex socio-economic systems. The reason why few cities take appropriate action to enhance their resilience lies in the difficulty of evaluating this process in terms of time. This paper aims to overcome the difficulties which afflict the concept of urban resilience when involved in urban planning, using a System Dynamics Model (SDM) as an evaluation tool to assess how urban resilience can change cities over time, addressing their complexity. This evaluation model is applied to simulate two different urban scenarios for a real case study in the city of Turin (Italy).