Real-life resilience: Exploring the organisational environment of international water utilities

The water sector has signalled the need to advance organisational and social resilience efforts. There is a lack of understanding of whether the organisational environment in water utilities is conducive to organisational resilience. Themes from interviews showcased challenges related to cognitive and contextual organisational properties. We identified a need to broaden the cognitive frame of utilities to account for flexible concepts of enhanced sense-making. We propose categories of organisational silos and a set of cultural attributes that contribute to organisational resilience. Interventions are needed to develop the cognitive, behavioural, and contextual properties of utilities that support organisational resilience.     

浅谈我国建筑工程质量保险

阐述了在我国实行建筑工程质量保险制度的重要意义和试点状况,针对存在的问题进行原因分析,提出了解决思路和具体对策,并对比了引进保险前后两种不同质量管理的运作模式,以突出其效果,进而加快这一制度的推行。     

Sponge Urbanism: The Cellular Redevelopment of New Orleans

Using New Orleans as a case study, the proposed research, Sponge Urbanism, examines the potential of infrastructure to anticipate, rather than react to, flux in ecologic, economic and technologic systems. Rather than enhance the false dichotomy between nature and culture, the aim is to rethink these systems and suggest broader, more integrated landscape and architectural tactics that achieve resilience in the face of extreme circumstances.     

Heterogeneous economic resilience and the great recession's world trade collapse

This special section aims to fill a gap in the regional resilience literature and to stimulate future spatial studies of resilience to include the international dimension in empirical analyses. It demonstrates the do‐ability and relevance by the natural experience of the global trade collapse that allows us to separate the effect of collapse upon event and ex post recovery because no ex ante resilience measures were taken. This is a great methodological advantage with respect to the literature on natural disasters and financial crises that is confronted with the difficulty of identifying resilience because of ex ante measures (prevention or inherent resilience measures) and ex post measures (recovery or adaptive resilience measures).     

回弹法检测岳阳地区混凝土抗压强度曲线的建立

基于岳阳地区混凝土抗压强度和回弹值相关关系的试验研究,进行了多种数学函数模型的拟合回归和精度、误差等回归方程效果的检验及比较,建立了岳阳地区幂函数回弹法地方测强曲线,并证明其优越性。同时对在几种因素影响下的混凝土强度和回弹值相关关系进行论述。     

Why are some Spanish regions more resilient than others?

Which of a region's characteristics most strongly influence its degree of resilience? This study constructs a composite resilience index for the Spanish regions and uses Multiple Factor Analysis to compare it with the Martin resilience index (Martin, 2012). The results of a Principal Components Analysis to measure the relative contributions of potential regional resilience drivers indicate that, during recovery periods, it is market- service focused regional economies that show stronger resilience, while, in crisis periods, it is regions with a more highly-educated workforce.     

The emerging addition of resilience as a component of sustainability in urban policy

The concept of resilience is progressively capturing the interest of scholars and practitioners in the field of urban policy. This increase in interest is directed towards the need for a better understanding of the conditions for effective and legitimate governance in a complex, interconnected, and volatile world fraught with a new class of poorly understood systematic risk. We are progressively observing resilience as a component of sustainability as the dominant organising frame in the field of urban planning. The application of the adapted Wilkinson (2011) framework, which we situate within a broader framework for evaluating metropolitan plans (Nguyen, Davidson & Gleeson, 2018), reveals the extent to which newly released metropolitan plans are incorporating strategies for social-ecological resilience. Our point is to offer an early assessment of the framing of social-ecological resilience within the embedded understanding of metropolitan planning practice. Our research has revealed that social-ecological resilience thinking has been incorporated only to a limited extent into metropolitan planning strategies worldwide, as demonstrated through the evaluation of our two sites—OneNYC and Plan Melbourne. We have argued that OneNYC incorporates the strategies of social-ecological resilience to a greater extent than Plan Melbourne, possibly pointing to a strengthening governing system by incorporating processes of social learning and adaptation. We conclude by acknowledging the critical insights into the limitations of the reality of implementing these ideas of social-ecological resilience within policy settings (see Duit, 2016), and which requires urgent consideration within a fuller institutional study that must in any case await the fuller roll-out of social-ecological resilience in sustainability agendas within city strategic planning.     

A hierarchy of measures for infrastructure resilience – learning from post-disaster reconstruction in Christchurch,New Zealand

Recent research into the concept of resilience has shown that it helps key players in urban development to assess and set priorities for resistance and recovery for disaster risk management. However, a competing issue within post-disaster recovery is managing the trade-offs between quickly restoring infrastructure services versus taking time to consider and consult on alternative options. Through an examination of the post-earthquake reconstruction in Christchurch, New Zealand, this paper considers infrastructure resilience by using a hierarchy of measures. This hierarchy shows how infrastructure resilience needs to be considered as a series of interventions in response to different levels of damage. It elucidates the varying nature of resilience measures, the decision-making processes required to implement them and constraints, chiefly in funding, that prevent wider application of such measures. This is an important consideration for defining and acting upon the opportunity for change created by a disaster. Furthermore, a broader examination of resilience in disaster risk management highlights that clarification is needed over what constitutes an appropriate response for community involvement in post-disaster infrastructure reconstruction.     

从等级空间切入的城市历史性住区改良——以汉润里住区更新为例

在回顾我国既往历史性住区更新思路的基础上,以武汉汉口汉润里历史性住区的更新设计为例,探讨在一种微调式柔性介入的再设计策略之下,通过弱化历史性住区内固有的等级空间,达到改善住区人居环境质量的目的。     

Evaluation of functional resilience in urban drainage and flood management systems using a global analysis approach

Enhancing resilience in urban drainage systems (UDSs) requires new evaluation approaches that explicitly consider vital interactions between threats, system performance and resulting failure impacts during both normal and unexpected (exceptional) loading conditions. However, current reliability-based approaches only focus on prevention of functional (hydraulic) failures resulting from a specified design storm. In this study, the global resilience analysis (GRA) approach is further extended for evaluation of UDS performance when subject to a wide range of random functional failure scenarios (extreme rainfall) with varying magnitude, duration, and spatial distribution. The resulting loss of system functionality during the simulated failure scenarios is quantified using total flood volume and mean flood duration. System residual functionality for each considered rainfall block loading scenario is quantified using the functional resilience index. The developed approach has been successfully applied to test and characterise the functional resilience to extreme rainfall of an existing UDS in Kampala city, Uganda. The study concluded that: (1) UDS functional resilience is significantly influenced by both occurrence of short duration, high intensity rainfall events and spatial rainfall variation during extreme rainfall conditions and (2) future planning and design of resilience enhancement strategies should apply spatially distributed rainfall inputs to facilitate effective sizing of potential adaptation strategies.     

Project team resilience: The effect of group potency and interpersonal trust

Project teams are likely to work under a high degree of stress and interpersonal demands that usually diminish performance. The ability of a team to prosper in these adverse conditions has been studied using the construct of team resilience, but there is still little knowledge about the determinants of team resilience in a project-based environment. Therefore, we propose a model in which interpersonal trust (i.e., cognition and affect-based trust) and group potency drive the perception of team resilience in project team members. We tested the model in a sample of 214 construction project management team members belonging to 50 teams. Our results suggest that affect-based trust and group potency mediate the relationship between cognition-based trust and project team resilience. We discuss the implications of these results for research on project team resilience and, more generally, how these findings could help enrich the literature on project management.     

The politics of co-design in ICT for sustainable development

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we discuss an approach to co-design in ICT for sustainable development. We first set out to consider sustainable development as incorporate a concern for resilience, adaptability, and autonomy. We then draw on an ongoing participatory design project to illustrate how co-design projects can be configured, along with the political choices that this entails, to support such development.     

Spatial and Temporal Quantification of Community Resilience: Gotham City under Attack

Mitigating the impact of disasters on communities requires not only a deep understanding of the essential features of infrastructure, social, and economical components that make a community resilient; but also the development of mathematical models that can seamlessly integrate these features. This article lays the foundation for an integrative model that captures interaction between these components. The underlying fundamentals of the proposed model hinges on the principle of a damped harmonic oscillator by assuming the behavior of a community in response to a hazard is equivalent to the response of a vibrating mass of finite stiffness and damping. We implemented the dynamic model by developing a novel finite element formulation capable of quantifying resilience both temporally and spatially. We then used the developed model to devise a suitable hazard‐agnostic definition of community resilience. This was realized through a set of demonstration and logical verification tests conducted on Gotham City, the fictional city of the infamous character, Batman. It was observed that the model can be used to identify sensitive and vulnerable areas in a community, provide a spatial and temporal quantification of community resilience, and accommodate various types of hazards such as physical disruptions, economic downtimes, and even social disorders.     

Testing and explaining economic resilience with an application to Italian regions

This paper studies regional economic resilience by exploiting the properties of the non‐linear smooth‐transition autoregressive model. A testing procedure to distinguish between engineering and ecological resilience is presented, and a measurement of economic resilience is provided. Regional differences in economic resilience are explained by the presence of spatial interactions and by adopting a set of determinants like economic diversity, export performance, financial constraints, and human and social capital. An empirical investigation is conducted for analysing regional employment evolution in Italy from 1992 to 2012. Some concluding suggestions propose possible future areas of research.     

Improving resilience through vulnerability assessment and management

The increasing complexity of infrastructure systems and the possibility of severe consequences due to interdependency and uncertain demands have led to an increased emphasis on resilience. Resilience, in simple terms, is the ability of a system to withstand adverse conditions and to recover quickly from these. Its interpretations and linkages to the related concepts of vulnerability and risk are examined. It is argued that vulnerability is an inherent characteristic of any system, hard or soft, and its identification and management is essential for improving the system's resilience. A systems approach to identify the vulnerable failure scenarios uses the concepts of form, connectivity and hierarchical modelling. Modelling of interactions with social systems and assessing their consequences requires dealing with uncertainty and it remains a challenge.     

‘Resilience thinking’ in transport planning

Resilience has been discussed in ecology for over 40 years. While some aspects of resilience have received attention in transport planning, there is no unified definition of resilience in transportation. To define resilience in transportation, I trace back to the origin of resilience in ecology with a view of revealing the essence of resilience thinking and its relevance to transport planning. Based on the fundamental concepts of engineering resilience and ecological resilience, I define ‘comprehensive resilience in transportation’ as the quality that leads to recovery, reliability and sustainability. Observing that previous work in resilience analysis in transportation has focussed on addressing engineering resilience rather than ecological resilience, I conclude that transformability has been generally overlooked and needs to be incorporated in the analysis framework for comprehensive resilience in transportation.     

Prior and governed stakeholder relationships: The key to resilience of inter-organizational projects

Increasingly, scholars are recognising the importance of resilience in projects. However, there is a lack of research on the resilience of temporary inter-organisational projects while considering the intricate relationship among multiple stakeholder organisations. We conducted an embedded comparative case study to investigate the mechanisms how stakeholder relationships involving prior ties and inter-organisational governance in the project support its resilience. Our results show that few prior ties among stakeholders keep them vigilant, fostering the readiness and preparedness for resilience, while many prior ties keep social solidarity among stakeholders, fostering the response and recovery for resilience. Contractual and relational governance improves resilience by clarifying stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities and forming collective cognition, respectively. We believe a plural governance design based on prior ties among stakeholders will improve resilience of the inter-organisational project, by promoting dynamically distributed and centralised stakeholder engagement in preparing, responding and recovering from the unexpected.     

Improving community resilience to natural events

Improving community resilience requires a way of thinking about the nature of a community. Two complementary aspects are proposed: the flows connecting the community with its surrounding environment and the resources the community needs for its ongoing life. The body of necessary resources is complex, with many interactions between its elements. A systems approach is required to understand the issues adequately. Community resilience is discussed in general terms together with strategies for improving it. The ideas are then illustrated and amplified by an extended case study addressing means of improving the resilience of a community on the West Coast of New Zealand to natural disasters. The case study is in two phases. The first relies on a mix of on-the-ground observations and constructed scenarios to provide recommendations for enhancing community resilience, while the second complements the first by developing a set of general lessons and issues to be addressed from observations of the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.     

Radical Resilience: Autonomous Self-management in Post-disaster Recovery Planning and Practice

This paper’s purpose is to develop a concept of radical resilience. We do so by drawing from both agonistic and anarchist planning theory. Radical resilience exists when people mobilize their ability to manage their affairs for themselves. This ability often emerges following an agonistic conflict with a governing power. We illustrate how radical resilience looks in practice by examining three cases: New Orleans after Katrina in 2005, Indonesia after the 2004 tsunami, and Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. We conclude that the emerging field of disaster recovery planning could benefit from a close engagement with the concept of radical resilience.     

Are we planning for resilient cities in Ghana? An analysis of policy and planners' perspectives

This paper sets forth a set of four principles that define and operationalise the concept of urban resilience. Using these four principles, 105 registered planners with the Ghana Institute of Planners were interviewed and five most recent and relevant national planning documents (four legislation, and one policy) were evaluated to determine how well planning practice advances resilience planning. Findings indicate limited appreciation of the concept amongst planners, despite the national planning documents stating an intention to integrate urban resilience. In addition, these national planning documents do not provide balanced support for all four urban resilience principles, as they advance some principles significantly more than others. More importantly, there is a disconnect between these national planning documents on the one hand, and planning practice on the other, as planning actions are not consistent with the legislation and policies. This paper recommends education of planners on urban resilience issues, credentialing of the concept in the local context, and reconsideration of international agencies' role in resilience planning in Ghanaian cities.