Robustness and Resilience of cities around the world

TL;DR

This paper explores urban resilience by analyzing large datasets of cities worldwide using complexity science methods, revealing significant differences in infrastructure fragility and service distribution.

Contribution

It demonstrates how to quantify urban resilience objectively using publicly available data and complexity science techniques like percolation theory.

Findings

Cities show large differences in infrastructural fragility.

Imbalances exist in the distribution of critical services.

Urban resilience varies significantly across different cities.

Abstract

The concept of city or urban resilience has emerged as one of the key challenges for the next decades. As a consequence, institutions like the United Nations or Rockefeller Foundation have embraced initiatives that increase or improve it. These efforts translate into funded programs both for action on the ground and to develop quantification of resilience, under the for of an index. Ironically, on the academic side there is no clear consensus regarding how resilience should be quantified, or what it exactly refers to in the urban context. Here we attempt to link both extremes providing an example of how to exploit large, publicly available, worldwide urban datasets, to produce objective insight into one of the possible dimensions of urban resilience. We do so via well-established methods in complexity science, such as percolation theory --which has a long tradition at providing valuable information on the vulnerability in complex systems. Our findings uncover large differences among studied cities, both regarding their infrastructural fragility and the imbalances in the distribution of critical services.