01.11.2021 NaDiMa Dialogue #15 | Advancing Disaster Risk Management Through Urban Resilience Assessment | 25 & 27 November
A series of prominent natural and technical hazards, as well as socio-economic and socio-political shocks, highlighted that our communities are not immune to the forces of sudden shocks or chronic stresses. Since cities are at the forefront of these challenges and their consequences, there is a greater need than ever before for building resilient cities to ensure that they are able to anticipate, absorb, recover, and learn quickly from unexpected changes. Resilience is all about dealing with change, adapting, and transforming in response to change, and has been at the core of scientific and political discourses on risk reduction and management over the past two decades. However, the growing interest in and need for resilience has not led to a shared understanding of how the concept is perceived, defined, and operationalized. This has called for further discussion and exchanged between relevant stakeholders (including academics, policymakers, practitioners, etc.) at the interface of science and policy. This is particularly important because while the translation of resilience as an abstract scientific concept into policy is increasingly in demand, it is at the same time quite challenging and requiring a highly contextualized perspective. Since resilience is a place-specific and multi-dimensional term, operationalizing the concept can predispose decision-makers, stakeholders, and urban planners to understand factors that contribute to resilience and interventions to build and enhance it.
Therefore, this workshop aims at presenting concepts, indicators, and methodologies to operationalize urban resilience to acute shocks (case of Iran) or chronic stresses (case of Germany). Operationalizing resilience has often been performed through developing composite indicators. The procedures of composite indicators building will be based on the methodology outlined in Asadzadeh et al. (2017). This will enable participants to get familiar with existing theoretical frameworks that enable exploration, explanation, and evaluation of resilience to different disasters. In addition, the workshop will present the procedure for composite indicator building toward measuring resilience, including real applications in two different risk and hazard contexts from Germany (Asadzadeh et al., 2020) and Iran (Asadzadeh et al., 2015). Furthermore, the dominant challenges and opportunities for conceptualizing and operationalizing resilience will be discussed. References
Kontakt
Prof. Dr. Mohammad Reza Farzanegan