Resilient urban planning: Major principles and criteria

The notion of resilience is rapidly gaining ground in the urban sustainability literature. The frequency of recent incidents including natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes, and also difficulties caused by the economic downturn has highlighted the vulnerability of human settlements and makes the appropriate consideration of resilience in the planning for future of urban areas of vital significance. Development of an assessment framework for evaluating the extent of resiliency of urban areas can be an effective way of incorporating resiliency-related issues into the urban planning process. For this purpose, it is necessary to clarify the implications of the resilience concept for the sustainability of urban areas. It is also important to identify resilience-related principles and criteria that should be embedded in the framework for assessing the resiliency of urban environments. This study involves an initial review of the literature on resilience and urban sustainability to extract a comprehensive set of criteria that can be used to develop an urban resilience assessment system. Moreover, it tries to design a conceptual framework, illustrative of the inter-relations between these various set of criteria. Criteria for assessment of the resilience of urban areas are divided into several main themes that cover environmental, economic, social, and institutional dimensions of sustainability. These themes would further be broken down into major criteria to account for important relevant areas such as land use, infrastructure, health, etc. The output of this study can be used as the basis for defining a set of precise indicators that will constitute a potential assessment tool for measuring the resilience of urban developments. The resilient assessment process has the capacity to provide decision makers with a clear and comprehensive picture of the resilience of the development proposal and supports them in making better informed decisions.