Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta, Alessandra Faggian, Ombretta Caldarice
More info: The concept of resilience has arisen as a “new way of thinking”. It was applied in planning at th...e end of the last century as a concept that encourages policies to face stress factors and react by renewing and innovating cities. Resilience becomes instrumental in addressing both causes and effects of significant global challenges. As it motivates the transformative potentials of cities, resilience is commonly named “co-evolutionary resilience” or, most recently, “transformative resilience”. Following this more profound meaning, resilience is not only the opposite of vulnerability but also a “broad concept”, whose final purpose is to prevent and manage unforeseen events together with the improvement of the environmental and social quality of a territorial system. In a nutshell, this approach characterises resilience as a territorial systems’ capacity to respond systemically and dynamically to the present and future shocks related to significant global challenges through non-linear transformation processes. Such processes involve the natural and anthropic characteristics of a territorial system, their performance, quality, and functions. Although the theoretical debate on resilience is deeply investigated, several methodological challenges remain mainly related to the concept’s practical sphere. As a matter of fact, resilience is commonly criticised for being too ambiguous and empty meaning. At the same time, turning resilience into practice is not easy to do. We need to measure resilience because its assessment allows consideration of what resilience is practical and what it is possible, and at which point resilience is realistically likely to fail. This will be arguably one of the most impactful global issues for future research on resilience.
The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading. To the best of our knowledge, it seeks to synthesise the state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. We were particularly interested in papers that address one or more of the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? How can urban resilience a property to be measured? What are the existing models and methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to guide proper adaptation and territorial governance? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?”
The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading. To the best of our knowledge, it seeks to synthesise the state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. We were particularly interested in papers that address one or more of the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? How can urban resilience a property to be measured? What are the existing models and methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to guide proper adaptation and territorial governance? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?”
2021 | Journal Articles
Evaluating and Planning Green Infrastructure: A Strategic Perspective for Sustainability and Resilience
Author(s): Angioletta Voghera, Benedetta Giudice
More info: In the light of the current changing global scenarios, green infrastructure is obtaining increasing relevance in planning policies, especially due to its ecological, environmental and social components which contribute to pursuing sustainable and resilient planning and designing of cities and territories. The issue of green infrastructure is framed within the conceptual contexts of sustainability and resilience, which are described through the analysis of their common aspects and differences with a particular focus on planning elements. In particular, the paper uses two distinct case studies of green infrastructure as representative: the green infrastructure of the Region Languedoc-Roussillon in France and the one of the Province of Turin in Italy. The analysis of two case studies focuses on the evaluation process carried on about the social-ecological system and describes the methodologies and the social-ecological indicators used to define the green infrastructure network. We related these indicators to their possible contribution to the measurement of sustainability and resilience. The analysis of this relationship led us to outline some conclusive considerations on the complex role of the design of green infrastructure with reference to sustainability and resilience.
2019 | Journal Articles
Resilient Safer Approach to cope the oily waste generation in industrial facilities: lessons learned from Cuban installations
Author(s): David Javier Castro Rodriguez, Omar Gutiérrez Benitez, José Poma Rodriguez, Dayana Ribassa Ribassa, Orlando Viera Ribot, Emanuel Caslas Perez, Fulvia Chiampo, Alberto Godio, Micaela Demichela
More info: Nowadays, huge quantities of oily wastewater and oily solid wastes are associated with different industrial activities, which not only may harm the environment and human health but also a performance worsening of the installation. The goal of this study was to establish a resilient approach to cope with oily waste generation in industrial facilities. Several lessons learned from Cuban installations studied separately for ten years in the municipality of Cienfuegos were the cornerstone for the model definition. The approach included the development of a novel methodology to address integrated features of loss prevention in the operation of petroleum transport, storage, process, handling, and use. This methodology was designed and improved using the principle of convergence to integrate engineering procedures, standards, technical and management tools. The results from the methodology implementation generated a list of findings translated into industrial failures modes, that can impact both environment and human health. Then, a set of general and specific causes associated including the incidence of the natural events were deployed in different orders. The environmental monitoring around the plants offered a significant sample of points that allowed the spatial representation of how hydrocarbon pollution constitutes a complex network of permanent stress rooted in the territory of Cienfuegos. Moreover, a package of inherently safer solutions was generated as primary prevention, integrating the waste management hierarchy concept. At last, this iterative approach generated a research project to develop a bioremediation technique for the treatment of oily sludge from maintenance operations, which can be neither eliminated for the inherently safer solutions nor disposed to the environment. The lessons learned from Cuban installations enabled the conception of this resilient approach, which represents a framework to improve industrial safety performances contributing to the release reduction of oily waste. In addition, it represents a contribution to increasing the awareness of industrial vulnerabilities in the territorial resilience analysis.
2020 | Journal Articles
Mainstreaming climate resilience: A GIS-based methodology to cope with cloudbursts in Turin, Italy
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta, Ombretta Caldarice, Martino Faravelli
More info: Cities play an increasingly significant role in the challenges posed by climate change, mainly due to their role in economic and demographic drivers. It is generally agreed that the intensification of climate change effects, such as extreme weather events, requires strengthening in the mechanisms of adaptation and the endogenous self-organization of urban systems. An operative way to adapt is by mainstreaming climate resilience, i.e., the iterative process of integrating climate change considerations into policymaking, budgeting, implementation, and monitoring processes at national and subnational levels. This paper falls under this heading, and it aims at building an innovative methodology to experiment with data-driven approaches to support the resilient transition of the city of Turin in Italy. The process aims to create territorial knowledge of specific weather phenomenon, that cloudburst events are, by filling the gap of existing hazard information with original vulnerability datasets. The proposed approach will create a hydraulic vulnerability map by identifying cloudburst vulnerable areas with a GIS-based spatial overlay. The paper will employ an array of datasets combined with original modelling techniques elaborated with the help of the open-source InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs) software program. The results allow us to understand what would happen if the urban water network failed to discharge during a phenomenon of intense rain and, consequently, which city areas should undergo adaptation and transformation to reduce their flooding vulnerability.
2022 | Journal Articles
Pianificare la post-carbon city per la resilienza dei territori
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta
More info: Negli ultimi decenni stiamo assistendo a scala planetaria ad una debole o pressoché nulla capacità di risposta dei territori agli eventi causati dalla dinamica sistemica in atto del cambiamento climatico. Gli effetti rilevanti del cambiamento climatico sono il prodotto della frammentazione degli ambienti naturali e della crescente vulnerabilità dei suoli, conseguenti alle intense e progressive dinamiche di urbanizzazione in atto. L’attuale modello di sviluppo - prioritariamente fondato sullo sfruttamento intensivo ed estensivo delle risorse naturali - è ancora oggi sostenuto da una dinamica di urbanizzazione in incremento a scala globale, fortemente dipendente da fonti energetiche fossili. Nonostante siano trascorsi trenta anni dalla Conferenza ONU di Rio de Janeiro (1992) che introdusse il concetto culturale di sviluppo sostenibile e portò alla condivisione internazionale della necessità di dare avvio a politiche per ridurre le emissioni di “gas serra”, il concetto di post-carbon city, ovvero di città a neutralità climatica, è relativamente recente nelle strategie internazionali.
2022 | Book Section
Defining a social-ecological performance to prioritize compensatory actions for environmental regeneration. The experimentation of the environmental compensation plan
Author(s): Angioletta Voghera, Benedetta Giudice
More info: Performance-based planning (PBP) is an approach to define a flexible, strategic and site-based scenario for the improvement of the social-ecological quality of the territory. The paper provides an experimentation of environmental compensation within the Italian context that can be traced back to the performance-based planning approach. The experimentation proposed is the Environmental Compensation Plan (ECP) of the Stura di Lanzo River, where the involvement of local stakeholders, environmental evaluation, environmental planning and design have been linked together for the definition of specific renaturalisation and environmental regeneration actions within the context of the River Agreement (RA). The ECP and relative methodological framework are then proposed to select and design priority actions of environmental compensation in different territorial contexts. Finally, some indications to further enhancing ECP effectiveness following PBP approach have been reported.
2020 | Journal Articles