Resilience of Complex Urban Systems: A Multicriteria Methodology for the Construction of an Assessment Index

Abstract

The environmental-climate changes and the Covid-19 emergency have highlighted the weakness of urban systems by raising the attention on adequate tools able to support the improvement of multi-events resilience. The social, natural and economic features that characterize the urban environment, make it a complex system that need to be comprehensively assessed for taking into account all the relevant factors that contributes on their resilience. Aim of the work is to define a multicriteria-based methodology able to create a geo-referenced Urban Resilience Index (IUR) that represents the capacity of the territory to face socio-economic diseases and natural disaster. The proposed protocol consists of a step by step guide for creating the IUR with the adoption of the Analytic Hierarchy Process technique for structuring and aggregating the system of indicators that represent the relevant economic, environmental and social contributions to the resilience of a certain territorial scale, and the geographic information system for the visualization of the different spatial distribution of the resilience. The proposed methodology can be used as a decision support tool for public-private partnership’s urban intervention aimed at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals of the Agenda 2030 and the European Green Deal targets. Its flexibility makes it implementable for several sustainable urban planning decision at different scale and it can be adopted for an ex ante evaluation of the urban parameters from which derive the balance sheets and the pressures on the environment.