A System Dynamics Model and Analytic Network Process: An Integrated Approach to Investigate Urban Resilience

Abstract

During the last decade, the concept of urban resilience has been increasingly implemented in urban planning, with the main aim to design urban development strategies. Urban resilience is a multi-dimensional and dynamic concept. When applied to urban planning, it consists of studying cities as complex socio-economic systems. Municipalities are currently working to undertake appropriate actions to enrich the resilience of cities. Moreover, several difficulties concern the evaluation of the impacts over time of the strategies designed to enhance urban resilience. The present paper proposes an integrated approach based on the System Dynamics Model (SDM) and the Analytic Network Process (ANP). The objective of this research is to describe the method and to illustrate its application to the area called Basse di Stura, located in the city of Turin, Italy. The method is applied to evaluate the possible impacts of two different urban scenarios in terms of the change of urban resilience performance over time. The final result is represented by an index that describes urban resilience performance.