A territorial view of the infrastructure resilience

The challenge to make cities and, more in general, the territories inhabited or exploited by humans safe, and resilient, includes mitigation and adaptation strategies against disaster, as a central issue in achieving sustainability. A tool to measure local vulnerability from a multi-risk approach is proposed and discussed. The tool consists of a mathematical framework for the territorial vulnerability assessment that integrates multiple indicators clustered into three factors defined as sensitivity, pressures, and hazards, weighted according to a participatory procedure. These include the infrastructures at the service of the territories and the effects of their disruption. Cascade effects can be also considered in the model, as mutual influences among factors, to keep into account, as an example, climate change related phenomena. Space-dependent analyses using the Geographical Information System were developed from the multiple nested indicators to project the vulnerability index onto a homogeneous grid in the territory of interest. Thematic maps referring to the systemic vulnerability by different sensitivity components were generated. The tool contributes to increasing the awareness of territorial vulnerability and offers support to resilience-based decision-making in designing technical measures of policies at a local scale, whose managers are potentially disoriented by more complex models. A municipality in North-West Italy was used as a case study, concerning the process/energy infrastructures, within the research activities of the Responsible Risk Resilience Centre from the Polytechnic of Turin to test the vulnerability matrix. Further research is required to implement the framework in different scenarios and develop the model's temporal behaviour.