Enhancing Urban Resilience Capacities: An Analytic Network Process-based Application

The current urban challenge is enhancing, maintaining and improving the urban resilience of cities. However, how can cities as complex and adaptive systems be or become resilient? There are specific capacities/qualities that urban systems should have to enhance and maintain their resilience (e.g. redundancy, resourceful, robustness, etc.). Different studies list and describe these capacities in literature, underling also to which urban dimension (e.g. economy, society) they are referred. However, there is a lack of quantitative assessment of these capacities. As well, the analysis of which degree different urban components can enhance and maintain these capacities. Based on the socio-ecological approach of urban resilience, this study proposes the application of multicriteria analysis (MCA) to evaluate which degree the different urban components can support the enhancement and the maintenance of the specific urban resilience capacities. The proposed framework is an indicators-based method that includes a multidimensional set of urban resilience indicators and the set of urban resilience capacities. In detail, the Analytic Network Process (ANP) has been selected according to its ability to consider the mutual interconnections of the evaluation elements. Moreover, a multidisciplinary panel of experts is asked to weigh the importance of the different urban components in enriching the different urban resilience qualities. The final result is a set of priorities that assess the relative importance of each urban component about a specific urban resilience capacity. The illustrated application is a preliminary pilot case study that quantifies the possibility of quantitatively assessing the urban resilience capacities. In detail, this application refers to a more complex and comprehensive evaluation approach that combines MCA with the System Dynamics Approach (SDM). Therefore, the next step of this research will concern the aggregation and the employment of the obtained priorities in the abovementioned approach to correlate the urban resilience performance with the urban capacities.