Mapping Urban Resilience for Spatial Planning—A First Attempt to Measure the Vulnerability of the System

Abstract

The concept of ‘resilience’ breaks down silos by providing a ‘conceptual umbrella’ under which different disciplines come together to tackle complex problems with more holistic interventions. Acknowledging the complexity of Davoudi’s approach (2012) means to recognize that ‘spatial resilience’ is influenced by many phenomena that are difficult to measure: the adaptation and transformation of a co-evolutive system. This paper introduces a pioneering approach that is propaedeutic to the spatial measure of urban resilience assuming that it is possible to define a system as being intrinsically vulnerable to stress and shocks and minimally resilient, as described by Folke in 2006. In this sense, vulnerability is counterpoised to resilience, even if they act simultaneously: the first includes the exposure to a specific hazard, whereas the second emerges from the characteristics of a complex socio-ecological and technical system. Here we present a Geographic Information System-based vulnerability matrix performed in ESRI ArcGIS 10.6 environment as an output of the spatial interaction between sensitivities, shocks, and linear pressures of the urban system. The vulnerability is the first step of measuring the resilience of the system by a semi-quantitative approach. The spatial interaction of these measures is useful to define the interventions essential to designing and building the adaptation of the built environment by planning governance. Results demonstrate how mapping resilience aids the spatial planning decision-making processes, indicating where and what interventions are necessary to adapt and transform the system.