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

As over half of the world’s inhabitants lives in metropolises, the rapid growth in urbanization has made cities becoming 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 the cities. “Resilient City” is a new paradigm that challenges the idealistic principle of stability and resistance to change implicitly in sustainable development and 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, less were explicitly focused on developing practical sequential steps of resilience building that the city can follow. This paper aims to narrow a gap of that missing body of knowledge by describing a brief methodological framework, which includes procedural steps in assisting the planning and management processes of resilient city development and critical infrastructures protection. A platform is proposed for integrating 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”, developed by Electronic Arts and the City of Norfolk in United States of America, as an example.