The Resilient City: A Platform for Informed Decision-Making Process

As over half of the world’s population lives in cities, the rapid growth in urbanization has made cities become more and more exposed and vulnerable to a broad spectrum of threats and hazards. In order to respond to such difficulties, a concept of resilience is considered a significant component for the long-term planning and sustainable development of cities. “Resilient City” is a new paradigm that challenges the idealistic principle of stability and resistance to change implicitly in sustainable development and long-term success. However, building a resilient city requires a holistic approach, as well as the appropriate adoption of knowledge and application of tools during the planning and management process. Although there are many studies intended at enhancing the capacity of city resiliency, few are explicitly focused on developing practical sequential steps of resilience building that the city can follow. Thus, this research aims to narrow a gap of that missing body of knowledge by developing a methodological framework, which involves procedural steps in assisting the planning and management processes of resilient city development. The platform proposed in this dissertation was developed based on a theoretical approach, called “Resilient Informed Decision-Making Process.” It integrates the use of concepts and techniques, including project management, risk and vulnerability assessment based serious gaming, multi-criteria decision analysis, and object-oriented programming. To demonstrate the efficacy of a platform, the methodology is incorporated with the urban planning simulation computer game “SimCity 2013” and the “City of Norfolk” as an example