(Re)emphasizing Urban Infrastructure Resilience via Scoping Review and Content Analysis

Abstract

Although the importance of urban infrastructure resilience can be inferred, its terminology remains convoluted within the literature due to a lack of systematic review from a sustainable development planning perspective. This review paper was designed to elucidate connected research themes, scientific popularity, and conceptual boundaries of the term infrastructure resilience in an urban context. Three guiding research questions were asked: What does urban infrastructure resilience really mean? What are the most common research topics connected to urban infrastructure resilience? How can humanity further improve urban infrastructure resilience from a sustainable development planning perspective? To answer these research questions, a two-step literature analysis was adopted consisting of: (i) a scoping review to select relevant publications based on a specific search query; and (ii) a content analysis to reduce and synthesize the scoping review findings further based on the three most applicable publishing outlets. The scoping review reduced articles to 535, while content analysis further condensed it to 84 across three key journals. With North America and Europe leading, the findings corroborated that eight connected subject areas establish the conceptual boundaries of urban infrastructure resilience. The eight related research topics in decreasing abundance were: (1) climate change, (2) floods, (3) disasters, (4) environmental policy, (5) ecosystems, (6) risk assessment, (7) emergency preparedness, and (8) adaptation. In conclusion, these research topics should be pursued when creating urban infrastructure resilience strategies for moving towards sustainability.