Resilience Assessment of Urban Communities

The multiple uncertainties of both natural and man-made disasters have prompted increased attention in the topic of resilience engineering. In this paper, an indicator-based method for measuring urban community resilience is proposed. The method is based on the PEOPLES framework, which is a hierarchical framework for defining disaster resilience of communities at various scales. It consists of seven dimensions summarized with the acronym PEOPLES: Population; Environment; Organized governmental services; Physical infrastructures; Lifestyle; Economic; and Social capital. Each of the dimensions is split into several components and indicators, which have been derived by the authors or collected from a wide range of literature. Each indicator is represented using a performance function, which portrays the functionality of the indicator in time. Higher functionality of the indicator leads to higher resilience of the community. These functions can be constructed in a systematic manner using damage and restoration parameters. The aggregation of the performance functions, passing through the different hierarchical levels of PEOPLES framework, leads to one function that represents the dynamic performance of the analysed community. This paper also introduces a matrix-based interdependency technique that serves as a weighting scheme for the different indicators. As a case study, the proposed methodology is applied to the city of San Francisco for which a resilience curve and a resilience metric have been computed.