Approaches to Measurement of Urban Resilience

Abstract

Measurement is a prerequisite for systematic development. Resilience measurement approaches have been developed for assessment, planning and follow up resilience development. In this chapter I will review several different resilience assessment systems that either measure resilience performance (past incident and the urban system’s reaction in that) or resilience as competence (city’s perceived capability to adapt, recover and benefit of shocks). The methods analyzed are Rockefeller Foundations 100 resilient cities measurement framework, UN Habitat disaster measurement system, New Zeland based method, the system produced by the Strategy Alliance and the method developed in the Global X Network. None of these approaches are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but they have been developed for a specific purpose, they have different objectives, principles, methods and data used. The analysis framework consisted of five systems theoretical dimensions: structure, interaction, coordination, renewal and resources. The analysis revealed that the approaches can be divided into three clusters; firstly survey based method that collect perceptions, second existing statistical data based methods and third multimethod approaches. One of the main conclusions was that none of these methods paid any or thorough attention on interaction between urban system components. Even if the methods try to assess resilience, the main source of adaptation—interaction dynamics—is not covered. But even if the existing resilience measurement methods have weaknesses, I think that the comparison presented in this chapter provides resilience developers a conceptual framework for assessment criteria for deciding which method they should use.