Urban resilience: From a limited urban engineering vision to a more global comprehensive and long-term implementation

• Published in: Water security 2020-12, Vol.11, p.100075, Article 100075
• Main Authors: Heinzlef, Charlotte, Serre, Damien
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Critical infrastructure; Geography; Humanities and Social Sciences; Observatory; Resilience assessment; Spatial decision support systems; Urban resilience
• ISSN: 2468-3124; 2468-3124
• DOI: 10.1016/j.wasec.2020.100075

•This article defends the usefulness of the concept of urban resilience as a risk management tool.•It presents two approaches to operationalizing the concept of resilience, a technical-functional approach and an organizational approach.•The technical-functional approach is developed around the issue of critical infrastructures and urban networks.•The organizational approach is analyzed through indicators of global, social, urban and technical resilience.•The originality of the article is that, after analyzing these approaches, it concludes on the problem of the multitude of methodologies that aim to operationalize resilience, including a resilience observatory. This paper presents a research project spanning over 15 years, dealing with territorial resilience to flooding. This paper presents a global retrospective view on how research on the concept of resilience began with a primary focus on critical infrastructure resilience networks. These infrastructures are always identified by experts as an aggravating factor leading to territorial systems disruptions. The focus on critical infrastructure resilience networks served as an important first step to improve knowledge on mechanism failures and their impacts on communities. However, this first step was insufficient in providing more resilient systems and territories to floods. Today, other approaches are useful for implementing strategies of resilience to answer city managers’ needs, such as organizational strategies, including participative tools. Long-term resilience is addressed within this research for territorial resilience monitoring and planning. This article is primarily based and illustrated on the research, projects and scientific advances conducted by the authors.