Over-urbanisation and climate change have increased probability, severity and intensity of urban floods. In only two years, dramatic events have impacted many areas in the world. Paris’ flood in 2016 and 2018, Hurricanes Harvey, impacting notably Huston City, Irma, impacting notably Florida, and Maria, impacting notably Dominica mid 2017, Asian monsoons in 2017, are examples of the worrying increase in natural disasters and their dramatic impacts.
Traditional risk management are no longer enough to cope with such phenomenon. Therefore, scientists and urban managers have tried, for more than ten years, to make urban systems simultaneously less vulnerable and more resilient to climate-related disasters. Injunction of international authorities to find a new risk management able to create a transition to a general culture of risk led researchers and managers to look at another approach to manage natural hazards. A new approach has thus been gradually integrated, based on the concept of urban resilience.
This concept is referring to the ability of a system to keep its own variables despite disturbances. Nevertheless, despite the increasing use of this concept, very few concrete actions have been made. While in Europe some studies have been done to build up vulnerability indicators, few still talk about resilience. When some do, they mainly focus on technical resilience without integrating social dimensions.
The scientific research proposed here aims at developing a holistic methodology to operationalize resilience by (re)defining its objectives and actions. To do this, this study is building up a tool facilitating understanding of this notion, and especially its integration into management and planning policies, at the crossroads of urban, technical and social resilience. We are developing a spatial decision-support system with our partner: Avignon city council (France), to measure current resilience based on urban, technical and social resilience factors.
By designing resilience indicators, we are helping Avignon to increase knowledge on its territory, to understand globally urban resilience and to build a strategy to improve urban capacities to face floods.
Preliminary results show precisely the components accentuating or diminishing the resilience and are already used by the city of Avignon in order to study quality of social and urban life.