Urban Disaster Resilience and Security

The normative concept of a resilient city is afflicted by the technocratic thinking that a desired—hence resilient—state of an urban area might be a) explicitly identifiable and b) uncertainties around it are controllable. Western principles of projectable future(s) and orderly reality, as well as (pre-) defined cause and effect chains, contribute to this overestimation. Based on the “vulnerable” status quo, resilience measures are suggested which often focus on one sector of the urban multi-cosmos and are trying to fix symptoms of said vulnerable state. This is particularly true for cities and urban areas in the global south. Oversimplified implementation strategies on “how to become resilient” fall short on the complexity of the urban risk landscape and leave those at risk in limbo. This ‘Urban Resilience Utopia’ poses a threat to the core of the resilience agenda as a transformative power. This chapter reaches out to the social resilience “capacities” concept and translates it into guiding questions for planning DRR development interventions. Key characteristics of the adaptive governance concept are used to evaluate the practicability of those questions using examples from Nepal. This chapter might be considered a plea for a thorough “rewind” of expectations once we try to practically operationalize resilience and for a critical self-assessment and thoroughgoing process of developing a common language among those involved in building resilience.

Over the past two decades the concept of ‘resilience’, and more specifically ‘urban resilience’, has gained increasing attention within urban planning research, policy and practice. However, the pursuit of resilience encounters a series of grounded challenges for urban planning practitioners and associated stakeholders. Among the most commonly cited challenges is the ‘fuzzy’ nature of the resilience concept or its lack of conceptual clarity. Indeed ‘resilience’ has been employed in a range of diverse fields in varying ways. As such, there are increasing scholarly calls for a more thorough understanding of the term’s migration into, and impact upon, planning practice. This chapter explores this critical question through an Irish lens, outlining the key challenges involved in ‘translating’ the concept from theory to practice. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the role of planning in urban resilience enhancement in the Irish context, with particular attention on large scale infrastructure projects (both critical and non-critical). In doing so, lessons are drawn from the findings of two large EU funded research projects, including INTACT and HARMONISE, both funded under the EU Seventh Framework Programme.

This chapter explores the evolving concept of disaster risk management and climate resilience building in the United States of America (USA) within the last two decades. The chapter starts by examining federal-level actions towards disaster risk management and climate adaptation and resilience and then delves into local-level actions through the case studies of Nashville, Tennessee, and Hoboken, New Jersey. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the future of climate resilience in the USA. The chapter illustrates that the availability of multiple layers of government has been an effective safety guard against any individual layer’s potential unwillingness to undertake protective risk management or climate resilience building. At state and regional levels, where political will was lacking, federal-level support, particularly in the Obama era, and the initiatives of private foundations have been very valuable. Nowhere, though, have climate resilience building actions in the USA been proven more effective than at the city administrative level. As everywhere else, local-level governments in the USA are at the forefront of disasters and the impacts of climate change and try to take the initiatives of preparing their cities for protection.

The main aim of this chapter is to analyze the viewpoints and measures for urban resilience in case of natural disasters in Iran from an urban designer’s point of view. The urban codes are among the anthropogenic agents of change in the built environments. Current Iranian urban regulations which are used for urban risk reduction are recently applied for achieving resilience. This chapter studies the effects of the formalizing codes which are implemented in a mid-sized city, Golestan, Iran. It concludes by analyzing if the existing measures have been successful for delivering resilience considering the multifaceted complexity of the concept. The author has conflated urban design points of view with socioecological systems’ adaptive capacities to create a list of criteria for measuring resilience. The cities and neighborhood have gone through transformations imposed by the application of urban upgrading codes, and the question is: Have they become more resilient? In addition, if the socioeconomic, environmental, institutional, and cultural consequences of spatial interventions are not considered, we cannot claim to have proper resilience measures. Resilience is a relative concept, and so it is the measure for achieving it, but the main challenge is to consider the different aspects related to its meanings and implications incase of natural disasters.

The USA operates and maintains a vast array of critical infrastructure (CI), from energy and water systems to transportation systems and communication nodes. Operating and maintaining this CI is a complex challenge, particularly as infrastructure continues to age and overall investments continue to decline. It is within this context that resilience is discussed. The roots of resilience in the USA go back for decades with a focus on disaster mitigation of infrastructure damage, developing plans and procedures, assessing vulnerabilities, hardening systems, building in redundancies, etc.; as well as developing standards, policies, and technologies for this purpose. The USA has a history of responding well in times of crisis, including national mobilization during the World War II and steps taken following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The US formally recognized resilience in national doctrine with the issuance of the 2010 National Security Strategy, which states that we must enhance our resilience—that is, our ability to adapt to changing conditions and prepare for, withstand, and rapidly recover from disruption (Obama in National security strategy of the United States, The White House, Washington, DC, 2010). Resilience policy has existed in various forms in other domains; however, this official declaration of strategy broadened the terminology to national security and helped reframe the focus. The US resilience focus is moving from a myopic physical security posture to a holistic resilience framework. Several key programs are increasing US CI resilience.

New forms of volunteering in events of emergencies and crisis are connected to the political goal of resilience within a growing number of applied research projects. This chapter offers an analysis of how factors such as long-term national research strategies, funding programmes supporting user- and market-driven applied research, expectations of a testable innovation, events such as the European 2013 flooding in Germany, citizens’ engagement and new social media work together in the formation of new approaches to volunteering within emergency and crisis response systems. By defining the population as being potentially active and engaged, these new forms of volunteer involvement aim to move beyond self-help in order to increase societal resilience. This chapter does also illustrate how resilience is operationalised within corresponding applied research projects in Germany. In order to do so, we will present the results of a full-scale scenario-based emergency exercise carried out as part of one of these projects. A comprehensive mapping of the research landscape is outside the scope of this chapter. However, we aim to address how a variety of factors are making up complex relations rather than linear and decisive patterns towards a predefined goal; the way the goal—the project outcome—is reached and the shape the innovation takes may be seen as an assemblage of structural, societal, environmental and technical conditions.

In 2002, a severe flood caused financial losses of EUR 11.6 billion in Germany and triggered many changes in flood risk management. This chapter focuses on flood insurance, which is a voluntary supplementary insurance in Germany: it is explored how flood insurance has contributed to enhance resilience of flood-prone residents. The analyses are based on empirical data collected by post-event surveys in the federal states of Saxony and Bavaria and refer to the three pillars upon which the concept of flood resilience usually builds in the natural hazards context: recovery, adaptive capacity and resistance. Overall, the penetration of flood insurance has increased since 2002 and there is strong empirical evidence that losses of insured residents are more often and better compensated than those of uninsured despite the provision of governmental financial disaster assistance after big floods. This facilitation of recovery is, however, not the only contribution to flood resilience. Insured residents tend to invest more in further flood mitigation measures at their properties than uninsured. Obviously, flood insurance is embedded in a complex safety strategy of property owners that needs more investigation in order to be addressed more effectively in risk communication and integrated risk management strategies.

Focal actors in disaster relief logistics are predominantly public authorities, emergency organizations, and NGOs, whereas private firms rather play a subordinate role—at least in the context of direct crisis intervention. Although it is entirely clear that engaging in public crisis management is not among the original tasks of commercial firms there is a substantial—and so far still unexploited—potential for public–private cooperation in a disaster situation. In this contribution, we outline the scope of a Public–Private Emergency Collaboration (PPEC) with a focus on the provision of essential goods and services. We discuss the different objectives and strategies of the partners and evaluate the potential for a PPEC for each phase of a disaster from an economic perspective with a primary focus on logistics operations. Based on a simple model, we identify the chance to improve crisis management operations by information sharing and coordinated allocation of resources and capacities for both the escalating and de-escalating phase of a disaster. Interestingly, a PPEC can also help to overcome public acceptance problems which could be occasionally observed in historic disasters. As key requirements of a PPEC, we identify a clear allocation of responsibilities between the public and the private partners together with sufficient incentives for commercial firms to engage in a PPEC on a sustainable basis.

Providers of urban critical infrastructures are often relying on indicator-based approaches for resilience management. While science is developing more and more intelligent resilience indicators, the application and interpretation of such indicators might lead to new challenges and questions. Since models always reduce the complexity of real world systems, users of the developed indicators need to understand the underlying assumptions. Otherwise, simplifications may lead to misinterpretations and severe consequences for the infrastructure providers and the society. In this chapter the authors discuss the difficulties related to the development and usage of resilience indictors and present relevant quality criteria for their evaluation and selection. Additionally, proper resilience assessment requires expert skills and an advanced knowledge and competence profile. Bloom’s learning taxonomy provides the theoretical underpinning which may be used to develop such profiles.

Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) offer an important way of improving infrastructure decision-making during the post-disaster recovery period. Although increasingly used in support of non-emergency planning decisions HIAs have not yet been widely adapted for disaster recovery contexts. The growing acceptance of broader definitions of health and the setting of future health goals, informed by lay preferences and perspectives as well as expert ones, are assisting the transition to new more holistic policies. Experience in New Jersey, following Hurricane Sandy, provides illustrations of infrastructure impacts and the challenges they pose to local communities. Traditional definitions of physical infrastructure are expanding to include categories like “green infrastructure” and “economic infrastructure”; experts and laypersons are also making different assessments of both the character and the salience of infrastructure needs. Multiple competing priorities for attention by survivors further constraint the degree to which infrastructure issues can be addressed by individual survivors and their families. Opportunities and barriers for the use of HIAs in disaster recovery are identified and explored. The coproduction of policies that capture varieties of knowledge and preferences about infrastructure among experts and laypeople is encouraged.

The behaviour of the urban network infrastructures, and their interactions during flood events, will have direct and indirect consequences on the flood risk level in the built environment. By urban network infrastructures we include all the urban technical networks like transportation, energy, water supply, waste water, telecommunication… able to spread the flood risk in cities, qualified as critical infrastructures due to their major roles for modern living standards. From history, most of cities in the world have been built close to coast lines or to river to beneficiate this means of communication and trade. Step by step, to avoid being flooded, defences like levees have been built. The capacity of the levees to retain the floods depends on their conditions, their performance level and the capacity of the authorities to well maintain these infrastructures. But recent history shows the limits of a flood risk management strategy focused on protection, leading to levee breaks these last twenty years, for example in the South of France. Then, in case of levee break, cities will be flooded. The urban technical networks, due to the way they have been designed, their conditions and their locations in the city, will play a major role in the diffusion of the flood extent. Also, the flood risk will have consequences in some not flooded neighbourhoods due to networks collapses and complex interdependencies. This chapter describes some methods to design spatial decision support systems in that context.

The concept of urban resilience has emerged in the context of flood risk management (FRM) from the need to consider the capability of the society to cope with floods. Whilst there has been much discussion about flood resilience, challenges still remain on how to enhance it. Participation of key stakeholders in the decision-making process has the potential to enrich the resilience of communities as they become more informed, learn from each other and trust is built amongst them. Despite the advantages of participation, community members and decision-makers usually do not play an active role in flood resilience studies. Therefore, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches may help to overcome these limitations whilst promoting social learning towards resilience building. This chapter describes a framework for FRM that can improve urban resilience through participation of local stakeholders with the use of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) tools. First, a systematic review of MCDA studies that tackle flood resilience is presented to provide a better understanding of how participatory MCDA is being conducted. Then, we introduce an innovative FRM participatory approach termed collaborative modelling (CM), which integrates MCDA tools in its process-driven decision-making. Furthermore, the CM-MCDA is supported by user customized Web-based tools to support information dissemination, social learning and negotiation amongst stakeholders. The developed framework was applied in the Cranbrook catchment (London, UK) and in the Alster catchment (Hamburg, Germany). The results show that the CM-MCDA provides an innovative and promising approach to enhance resilience through social learning.

This research effort introduces the idea of capturing the varying impacts of a disaster on an urban area by analyzing the nature of the public's changing requests for municipal services. By examining the relative number and timing of such requests, across a variety of different services, we can get an indication of how resilient the infrastructures are that are supported by those services, as well as how resilient the population is that relies upon them. In particular, we adopt a method for calculating resilience that characterizes both the observed impacts of a disaster and the time needed to recover from it by using such service request data. In order to explore the potential for characterizing multiple dimensions of urban disaster resilience in this way, we specifically leverage an empirical data set of non-emergency 311 service calls made in New York City between 2010 and 2012. This allows us to compare the relative performance of several types of service requests with respect to a set of different disaster events that impacted the New York metropolitan area during that time period and thus to characterize the different ways in which resilience was exhibited in response to those events.

The conversion to smart grids opens up a wide amount of possibilities to better control power distributions. The benefit is not only limited to a more secured and economical power distribution. It may also enable to bridge the gap between grid reliability management and disaster response. In particular under critical circumstances like grid instabilities, electricity may be missing or shortening. While distributing limited resources, the consideration of costumer’s performances, their criticalities and vulnerabilities regarding lack of electricity and other vital services, and the focus on a sufficient continued supply of critical services in an urban area may have a significant leverage effect on urban resilience. To benefit from this effect, we introduce and discuss the foundation of an agent-based system for the purpose of building urban resilience through a decentralized and agent-autonomous coordination of CI services in a city during an emergency situation. Therefore, we introduce the specification of decision-making in the context of critical infrastructures and disaster management in this chapter. Furthermore, we discuss the basic ideas of modelling critical infrastructures as agents and we demonstrate how their functionality is implemented in the model. A key topic of this chapter is a discussion about the design of the agent’s negotiation and its beneficial advantages in responding to critical infrastructure disruptions and in building more resilient cities.

The overall resilience of modern societies is largely determined by and dependent on resilience of their critical infrastructures (CI). These infrastructures are becoming increasingly smarter and more efficient by means of smart technologies such as sensors, gateways, processors. The use of smart technologies also makes the CIs increasingly interdependent and vulnerable to various hazards. CI resilience against threats, such as cyber-attacks, terrorist attacks, natural hazards, is pivotal to ensure continued operations and well-being of the society. To achieve this goal, understanding and measuring the resilience of the CI is of key importance. The main objective of the current research agenda is to improve existing approaches by providing an innovative “holistic” methodology for assessing resilience of smart critical infrastructures. The methodology proposed here, as part of the SmartResilience project, is based on resilience indicators (RIs), and it is structured in six levels (RIs, issues, phases, threats, CIs, and area/city) to obtain a measurement of the CI resilience within an area such as a city. The methodology helps understand “how resilient the CIs are against particular threats” and “what measures could help improve their resilience.” Furthermore, the chapter also provides first results of the implementation in sample case studies. This methodology is expected to be useful to visualize, trend, and benchmark the resilience at regular intervals, contributing to resilience management of smart critical infrastructures.

Resilience and security are prominent elements of twenty-first century European and international political agenda. The focus on resilient systems that are able to respond to threats, as well as to anticipate and recover, plays an important role in this regard. Increasingly sophisticated video surveillance systems form a part of security and disaster response mechanisms. In addition to technological advancement of surveillance systems, there are also concerns about the potential trade-off with human rights and freedoms of citizens. Thus, there is a need for means that allow for the protection of freedoms and human rights, while also ensuring security. One such solution, which deals with the potential of a new pan-European certification scheme for video surveillance systems, is presented in this chapter. This scheme focuses on evaluation according to the social dimensions of Security, Trust, Efficiency and Freedom infringement (S-T-E-Fi). Based on a description of the evaluation methodology and its criteria, two scenarios and how the methodology would be used for the purposes of evaluation of installed video surveillance systems operating within these scenarios are presented. The article finishes by outlining the future development of this scheme as well as further research needs.

Based on a reflection of resilience in the criminological context the article combines the logic of network theory with Bruno Latour’s Actor Network-Theory in order to provide a concept of situational resilience that allows overcoming the dichotomous interpretation of resilience as independent characteristics of individuals and objects. From this perspective, resilience develops as a result of everyday situations comprising the actions of people who are associated with each other and with specific non-human beings, and material artefacts. Resilience arises in the operational process of networking between these different entities. Situational resilience means that specific associations of human, non-human beings and artefacts produce qualities of resilience in concrete situationally embedded action processes. This conceptualization has consequences for the empirical research of situational resilience: social actors and material factors should be considered in their association in order to recognize resilience patterns and their respective conditions of embedding. The article recommends to analyse these characteristics in empirical research that is focused on resilience patterns of human-artefact-constellations in (urban) settlement spaces.

A central challenge of urban risk governance lies in the complexity of the overlapping of multiple risks. This problem is particularly relevant and obvious in urban infrastructure settings. The concept of riskscapes addresses and integrates various aspects of risks: the overlapping of different risks, the multiplicity of perspectives on the same spatial area and spatially different meanings and consequences. An important aspect of the riskscapes concept lies in the range of perspectives regarding the risks. This article takes a closer look at aspects of multiplicity and overlaps of different riskscapes as well as the spatial and temporal dynamics of risks and riskscapes while turning to empirical findings on the transportation of hazardous goods. This is discussed with a specific focus on stationary and mobile forms of risk in the context of urban infrastructures. Based on a comparison of risk management in the Netherlands and in Germany, an aligned risk management strategy in regard to spatial planning and hazardous incidents regulation is recommendable. A context-sensitive, practice-oriented, and socio-spatial understanding of risks is necessary to grasp the context of specific urban situations and to get an in-depth understanding of risk situations—including the aspects stationary and mobile risks.

European cities are characterized by a growing social inequality, residential segregation as well as socio-cultural differentiation. Consequently, the capability of urban residents to protect themselves or to resume normality after a large-scale disaster is unequally distributed. In this chapter, we develop and exemplify a conceptual approach to assess milieu-specific perceptions of risk, (in)security, and vulnerability and further this research within the conceptual framework of sociological disaster research. We argue that approaches to communicate risk prevention, to implement sustainable adaptation strategies, or to reduce unequally distributed vulnerabilities cannot be successful without the engagement of the inhabitant’s subjective perception patterns. A milieu-oriented research approach allows for the linking of the subjective dimension of risk, vulnerability, and (in)security with the social and spatial distribution of resources and capital (Bourdieu in Die feinen Unterschiede. Kritik der gesellschaftlichen Urteilskraft. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1987), which both form and reproduce social and spatial segregation (Scheffer and Voss in Erfolg durch Schlüsselqualifikationen? „Heimliche Lehrpläne“ und Basiskompetenzen im Zeichen der Globalisierung. Pabst Science Publishers, Berlin, Bremen, Miami et al., pp 102–115, 2008). Using a case study in a mid-sized German city as a basis, we will sketch the theoretical approach first, then exemplify it with empirical results, and close by drawing some conclusions on milieu-specific perceptions of risks, (in)security, and vulnerability in urban spaces.

Creating a resilient built environment for citizens is one of the main issues public authorities face when planning urban areas, such as new residential areas, suburbs, shopping centres, or traffic stations. Today, in particular, the safety and security of the built environment focuses on city planning. New technologies, including digitalisation, as well as citizens with differing feelings about and experiences of safety and security challenge city planners, and this requires attention. Utilising foresight methods, such as the participatory scenario-building method, is one way to adapt to future changes in urban settlements and help decision-makers in creating a better tomorrow for citizens. This paper presents one foresight method, termed scenario-building process, as a tool for city planners to create a safer and more secure built environment for citizens with different needs and backgrounds. The paper discusses how to use participatory scenario building together with city authorities and other stakeholders for planning urban areas. By presenting a case study from Finland, where the method was used to develop the area around a railway junction station, the paper brings out four scenarios developed to visualise possible future paths of the studied railway station area. The case study was part of the HARMONISE—A Holistic Approach to Resilience and Systematic Actions to Make Large-Scale Built Infrastructure Secure—project that was funded by the European Union within the Framework Programme 7.

Resilience has emerged as one of the major buzzwords for political and academic discussions that pertain to a constant well-being and functioning of societies and infrastructures. While the term has led to the emergence of various initiatives and funding schemes, the diversity of different concepts of resilience and its utility is quite large. The chapter reflects on several reviews that have recently been conducted to analyze the different ways of defining and conceptualizing resilience. Most of these reviews have been performed within current projects on disaster resilience that are funded by the European Commission. The discussion of these reviews serves to highlight overlapping but also potentially conflicting elements within the resilience discussions. Particularly, four questions are addressed within the discussion: (1) Does being resilient mean to be able to “bounce back”, or to adapt? (2) Who or what is resilient? (3) Does resilience target protection against unknown or known threats? And (4) what are boundaries of resilience to related concepts? The chapter then identifies overlap with similar terms such as risk management to provide possible ways forward and strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. It is thus a starting guide for scientists, policymakers, and other relevant stakeholders on how to ensure that resilience can be transformed into a concept that is open yet consistent enough to enable its operationalization.

This chapter focuses on resilience stakes that characterize urbanizing cross-border regions. While cross-border regions are characterized by multiple sources of vulnerabilities that are inherent to their development and history, knowledge remains partial in relation to how these regions address disasters that could affect both sides of the frontier. For decades, most cross-border regions have been expanding both from economical and institutional perspectives. In the meantime, urban density has been increasing, as well as the complexity of critical infrastructures—for instance, transportation or electricity distribution—that support essential services such as health care. Due to such complexity, these infrastructures represent major vulnerabilities for cross-border regions nowadays. In addition, borderland citizens’ behaviours remain uncertain, due to history and co-existing diverse cultural backgrounds. The chapter introduces the concept of resilience as a valuable lens to investigate disaster management of cross-border regions. More specifically, this chapter proposes to draw on resilience methodologies to address risks related to infrastructure, organization and behaviours in cross-border regions. By doing so, the chapter contributes to a holistic perspective on these vulnerabilities and their management when a disaster strikes. While a large spectrum of European projects has taken into consideration some of cross-border regions’ specificities, a comprehensive approach to cross-border resilience is still missing. We illustrate the relevance of this approach with the example of the French–German cross-border region. Going further, the chapter presents the INCA project that relies on multidisciplinary investigation of cross-border resilience and will deliver an agent-based model to support decision-making in cross-border regions facing disasters.

This chapter reflects on the parallels between resilience and adaptation and discusses whether a measurable resilience concept is useful for adaptation to climate change. It argues that a focus on measurability and operationalization risks to overemphasize conservative resilience concepts focused on maintaining the status quo (resilience as robustness) while marginalizing more intangible aspects such as learning (resilience as transformation). We suggest that those aspects of resilience that can be operationalized in a meaningful way should be integrated in existing concepts of climate change adaptation such as vulnerability and adaptive capacity. The most promising value of resilience for climate adaptation, we argue, actually lies in its ability to articulate a vision for a positive future (“Leitbild”). This meaning of resilience emphasizes the relevance of vision-building and the use of participatory instruments to foster learning and innovation. It is with this vision of development that resilience is able to expand the realms of climate adaptation.

The resilience concept and its application in the context of urban security encounter a series of grounded challenges for scientists, policy-makers, planning bodies, and the manifold authorities of jurisdiction and civil services. This chapter outlines a joint effort to explore structural and functional similarities and differences in France and Germany with regard to crisis management in urban systems, with the ultimate goal of identifying potential pathways of applying the resilience concept and exploring the potential for cross-national collaborative actions. Specific aspects of urban resilience and crisis management are portrayed: cross-border and international aspects, community resilience, psychosocial crisis management, and knowledge and information. In both countries, past and ongoing activities demonstrate the potential of connecting scientists and decision-makers in policy and practice to integrate multiple perspectives, bridging existing barriers between research, policy, and operational practice, and stimulating new technologies and innovative solutions. Furthermore, it became clear that enhancing urban resilience requires governance structures that promote cooperation among and between science, policy, and practice. Likewise, crisis management practices can be enriched through bi-national partnerships, collective activities, and shared co-management efforts. It is therefore suggested to further examine the various network strategies within hierarchical and horizontal collaboration structures and address the question of how the structural arrangements for collaboration within crisis management networks influence disaster resilience in urban areas.

Urban areas and resilient cities are flagships of recent research to investigate not only worst-case impacts of hazards but also maximum effectivity of measures. Disaster-related security is a special form of security, when in special conditions under external and internal stressors foci shift towards demands on survival and stability but also reliance on resources rarely used in normal conditions for most of the people, both residents and visitors of a city or settlement. This chapter summarises the key aspects of the previous chapters. Different types of framing resilience are detected in the different case studies. Main components of resilience used in both quantitative as well as in qualitative assessments are analysed. Potential pitfalls in transferring concepts between countries are detected. Critique on ‘measurability’ attempts is made, while at the same time pragmatic and innovative ways of conceptualising and assessing resilience in urban contexts are on display. Types and subtypes of resilience used in this book are listed, ranging from ‘climate resilience’ to ‘urban neighbourhood resilience’. Insights into how a resilient city can be constructed and planned are synthesised, as are aspects of smart cities and critical infrastructure that not only complement already existing measures and interests in sustainability but also set incentives for innovation.

Urban areas and resilient cities are flagships of recent research to investigate not only worst-case impacts of hazards but also maximum effectivity of measures. Disaster-related security is a special form of security; when in special conditions under external and internal stressors, foci shift not only towards demands on survival and stability but also towards reliance on resources rarely used in normal conditions for most of the people, both residents and visitors of a city or settlement. This chapter summarises the key aspects of the previous chapters. Different types of framing resilience are detected in the different case studies. Main components of resilience used in both quantitative as well as in qualitative assessments are analysed. Potential pitfalls in transferring concepts between countries are detected. Critique on ‘measurability’ attempts is made; while at the same time, pragmatic and innovative ways of conceptualising and assessing resilience in urban contexts are on display. Types and subtypes of resilience used in this book are listed, ranging from ‘climate resilience’ to ‘urban neighbourhood resilience’. Insights into how a resilient city can be constructed and planned are synthesised, as are aspects of smart cities and critical infrastructure that not only complement already existing measures and interests in sustainability but also set incentives for innovation.