Resilience of Interdependent Urban Systems

Dear Colleagues,

The majority of the global population lives in interlinked urban systems. While in a city different infrastructures and systems are interdependent, there is also an interlinkage of urban agglomeration. The resilience of such systems provides a measure of how they can cope with expected and unexpected shocks and stresses.

The enhancement of the resilience of urban systems and their infrastructures (e.g., water supply, urban drainage, transportation, communication network, and electricity) is an emerging topic for research and industry. There is a strong need for existing systems to adapt to tackle various challenges, such as climate change, increasing urbanization, natural disasters, cyber–physical attacks. This task requires resilience evaluation and intervention planning—the former entails developing a comprehensive understanding of the inherent resilience of the entire underlying system, and the latter comprises provision of evidence-based strategies for optimizing urban resilience at the lowest possible cost within its life cycle.

While there is comprehensive research on the independent resilience of different parts of urban systems, studies on the resilience of interdependent components of different parts of urban systems are rare. This topic, Resilience of Interdependent Urban Systems, aims to include papers addressing the emerging research gaps in urban resilience, including (but not limited to) the following:

• The resilience of interdependent infrastructures (e.g., water supply, drainage system, transportation, communication network, and electricity), and the nature of the interdependencies between them;
• Enhancing resilience by integrating different infrastructures with IoT-based solutions—smart cities;
• Advances in resilience metrics and standardization of resilience assessments;
• Interlinkage of different urban systems (e.g., different urban agglomerations);
• Trade-off between different intervention strategies, since increased resilience to one failure mode may decrease resilience to another;
• Comprehensive methodologies/frameworks for building resilience by adaptation (e.g., design, rehabilitation, renewal, and replacement) and governance of urban infrastructures;
• Impact of COVID-19 on urban systems and its infrastructures (impact of shutdowns, emergency operation, management strategies, reducing vulnerability to implications, etc.).

This topic aims to bridge this research gap by collecting emerging issues and solutions for the enhancement of urban system resilience and outlines the future directions of urban resilience studies.

Prof. Dr. Robert Sitzenfrei
Prof. Dr. Enrico Creaco
Dr. Kegong Diao
Prof. Dr. Christos Makropoulos
Prof. Dr. Ali Haghighi
Topic Editors