Academia is rife with extensive discourse on defining resilience, deep diving on semantics and context. Resilience historically and in some fields of discipline define resilience as a simple, linear pattern of bouncing back. When a disaster like an earthquake hits a city, turning it upside down, the city aggressively “recovers” by rebuilding similar structures, returning to their former state of stability, and proudly slapping on a “resilient city” sticker.
However, research scientists, like C.S. Holling, argue that resilience must be defined beyond this simple thinking of equilibrium states of stability. “The equilibrium-centered view is analytically more tractable, it does not always provide a realistic understanding of the system’s [complex] behavior.” (Holling, 1973) A resilient city is one that can prepare, absorb, persist and transform themselves after moments of shock. Cities are dynamic, unpredictable, complex systems with multiple players, elements, conditions that all interrelate with each other. Therefore a resilient city is one that can account for and be nimble to these variants. Because resilience is multifaceted, so must be the approach to resilience planning strategies.
Integrated assessment approach to resilience planning
Rita Brito and Adriana Cardoso drove home this concept and how they put it into practice in their day-to-day work. Cardoso and Brito are civil engineers at the Portuguese National Laboratory for Civil Engineering, with active participation in RESCCUE, UP2030, and ICARIA Projects. They designed their 3-day engaging course on the point that resilience planning needs to be integrated because of the complex nature of cities.
Human settlement, regardless of size and scale are heterogeneous, with complex interdependent infrastructures, assets, and organizations – feedback loops and “feedforward” paths. If one system fails without redundancy in place, it can have cascading impacts on other systems and ripple effects of disruptions. Therefore, resilience building involves thorough characterization of risk, exposures, vulnerability, consideration of interactions between service sectors and stakeholders, and interactions between multiple infrastructures.
Understanding the Built Environment and the Iterdependencies of Critical Infrastructures
We simulated their typical line of work through using various exercises, beginning with a simple exercise of surveying our individual hometowns’ infrastructure services and ranking their resilience strategies on a likert scale. This helped us understand the importance of place-based context when planning resilience.
The second exercise cemented the concept of interdependencies and their role in resilience planning. Different types of interdependencies are classified as: physical, geographical, logical and cyber. When we think of one trauma, we tend to think of the surface level impact it results in. For example, a hurricane tears through a vulnerable city. Power is cut off, the city is in the dark, schools and businesses shut down because of no lights. However, it runs deeper.
In the exercise, we mapped out a flow chart of a city’s critical services systems and their connection to the power grid, then developed a scenario of how a singular disaster event disrupts this interconnected system. This exercise helped us realize that when a power outage occurs – to continue with the same above example, street lights don’t function which leads to traffic jams, obstructing emergency response services to operate rescue, grocery stores stop operating on the longer term, leading to people losing access to food, and other local commerce stop functioning which effects regional commerce and beyond. One singular event can have quite vast, extensive cascading effects.
The disruption of critical infrastructure, telecommunication services, water or energy supply, transportation or financing systems, can cause significant harm to the safety and well-being of citizens and incur adverse economic effects that resonate beyond the directly affected area. For the above reason, some recommended resilient strategies are to create redundant infrastructures that replace another infrastructure of the same service, or create autonomous internal solutions that replace an external, failing service, such as having power generators to withstand when the power goes out. Several European based initiatives and networks, and standardization organizations exist like the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) dedicated to establish comprehensive frameworks and strategies, and implement good practices for reducing vulnerabilities and increasing resilience on critical infrastructures.
Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies
Application of the Resilience Assesment Framework
We concluded the week putting all the concepts together into a comprehensive exercise using ICARIA’s Resilience Assessment Framework (RAF). The toolkit uses asset and critical service systems to understand the impacts from complex disasters (e.g. compound and cascading events), and map out resilience plans for the region, city or service system. The class had the opportunity to work in groups, familiarizing with this open-access webtool and conducting their own mock study with an assigned city profile and scenario. The tool guides the user through the analysis process starting with identifying objectives and criteria, defining metrics through a series of survey-like questionnaires, then assigning reference values on resilience, and finally tying it altogether into a visual report outlining maturity level, gaps and proposing solutions.
ICARIA Resilience Assesment Framework interface
Last words
The ICARIA RAF tool blew me away with its expansive data set and sophisticated user-interface. It performs well in providing tailored comprehensive scenario mapping of hazards, vulnerabilities and exposures for their target model cities. It is a solid tool for other cities to reference when beginning their resilience assessment journey. However it should be approached with caution. Every city is unique and thus scenarios and solutions offered in the tool may not fully be compatible. Furthermore, resilience mapping of multi-hazard interactions is inherently a challenging effort. It is difficult to accurately estimate cascading effects, especially as hazard dynamics are constantly evolving as well as other contingent factors like ever changing finance and governance structures. The largest challenge of resilience assessment mapping lies beyond the RAF tool.
Overcoming the fragmented nature of government structures and limited political leadership are the ever imposing challenge; ensuring that they maintain momentum and timely follow through.The RAF offers extensive, thoughtful solutions and examples for cities to consider. It is up to those in power to prioritize following through with recommendations laid out by the tool and perform thorough assessments of their cities’ services.It was an honor and privilege to learn from esteemed professionals in the world of resilience engineering, Adriana and Rita. After spending weeks learning about resilience theories, their course gave context to how the concepts are applied in real life and measured with real-life examples and sophisticated tools. Access to the RESCCUE ICARIA RAF tool is available upon request to Rita and Adriana
By Christine Russo
Student at UIC Barcelona
Urban Resilience for Sustainability Transitions Master’s Programme (2025-2026)
References
https://www.oecd.org/en/about/members-partners.html
Brito R,, Cardoso A (2025, November 26 – 28). BUILT ENVIRONMENT RESILIENCE Lecture Series. Urban Resilience for Sustainable Transitions. International University of Catalunya
Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2096802
ICARIA. Resilience Assessment Framework (RAF)