Assessing Resilience of Urban Critical Infrastructure Networks: A Case Study of Ahvaz, Iran

Nonlinear and spatial spillover effects of urbanization on air pollution and ecological resilience in the Yellow River Basin

Based on Panel data collected from 2011 to 2020 targeted to 50 prefecture-level cities in the Yellow River Basin, this paper adopted standard deviation ellipse and spatial Dubin model to explore the nonlinear effects and spatial spillover effects of urbanization on air pollution and ecological resilience in the Yellow River Basin. The results show that the degree of air pollution in the southeast of the Yellow River Basin is higher than that in the northwest of the Yellow River Basin, the distribution range of air pollution is shrinking, the concentration of ecological resilience is enhanced, and the ecological environment is developing for the better. There is a significant U-shaped relationship between urbanization and air pollution in the Yellow River Basin, and an inverted U-shaped relationship between urbanization and ecological resilience. For every 1% increase in urbanization, air pollution decreases by 0.0873%, ecological resilience increases by 0.4046%. For every 1% increase in the square term of urbanization, air pollution increases by 0.2271%, ecological resilience decreases by 0.1789%. The urbanization of the Yellow River Basin has a spatial spillover effect on air pollution and ecological resilience, and urbanization has a significant negative impact on the ecological environment of neighboring cities. The robustness of the above conclusions is verified by introduce an inverse distance weight matrix replacing the spatial weight matrix.

Beta-lactamase determinants and molecular typing of carbapenem-resistant classic and hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae clinical isolates from southwest of Iran

This study investigated the molecular epidemiology of carbapenem-resistant classic Klebsiella pneumoniae (CR-cKp) and carbapenem-resistant hypervirulent Klebsiella pneumoniae (CR-hvKp) isolates in southwestern Iran. From 2019 to 2021, 136 (88.9%) cKp and 17 (11.1%) hvKp isolates were identified using biochemical tests and polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Antibiotic resistance, beta-lactamases, and clonal relatedness of carbapenem-resistant isolates were investigated using disk diffusion, PCR, and enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus polymerase chain reaction (ERIC-PCR), respectively. The different markers of hvKp isolates were as follows: string test (35.3%, n = 6/17), magA (11.8%, n = 2/17), rmpA (11.8%, n = 2/17), rmpA2 (52.9%, n = 9/17), iucA (52.9%, n = 9/17), and peg344 (35.3%, n = 6/17). Also, 55.1% (n = 75/136) of cKp and 47.1% (n = 8/17) of hvKp isolates were CR-cKp and CR-hvKp, respectively. All CR-hvKp (100.0%, n = 8) isolates were MDR. Colistin, tetracycline, and tigecycline were the most effective antibiotics. The occurrence of beta-lactamase genes in 75 CR-cKp and 8 CR-hvKp isolates was as follows: bla NDM (41.3, 25.0%), bla IMP (4.0, 0.0%), bla VIM (8.0, 0.0%), bla GES (14.7, 25.0%), bla OXA-48-like (20.0, 0.0%), bla CTX-M (26.7, 12.5%), bla SHV (24.0, 12.5%), bla TEM (10.7, 0.0%), bla FOX (6.7, 0.0%), bla DHA (6.7, 0.0%), bla CMY (5.3, 0.0%), bla LAT (12.0, 0.0%), and bla ACT (8.0, 0.0%). ERIC-PCR showed a high diversity among isolates. In this study, the occurrence of MDR CR-hvKp isolates harboring bla NDM and bla GES was detected for the first time in southwestern Iran. To prevent the spread of CR-hvKp and reduce selection pressure, long-term surveillance and more effective treatment strategies should be implemented.

Resilience in Infrastructure Systems: A Comprehensive Review

When encountering crisis events, systems, organizations, and people must react and handle these unpredictable events. Under these circumstances, important social functions and infrastructures must be restored or adapted as quickly as possible. This capacity refers to resilience. Although considerable research has been conducted on the resilience of infrastructure systems over the past years, a critical review of these studies remains lacking. Therefore, this study aims to bridge the knowledge gap by presenting a comprehensive review of infrastructure research conducted in the past decade, namely, from 2011 to 2021. On the basis of a systematic search, this study identified 222 journal articles investigating infrastructure resilience. A review of the identified papers revealed five research streams in the area of infrastructure resilience (IR), namely, the assessment of infrastructure resilience, improvement of infrastructure resilience, conceptualizing infrastructure resilience from various perspectives, factors influencing infrastructure resilience, and the prediction of infrastructure resilience. This study also presented some directions that future research can pursue. These directions include analyzing factors influencing infrastructure resilience based on simulation, assessing the resilience of green infrastructure, improving the resilience of interdependent infrastructure, and predicting the resilience of infrastructure based on empirical research.

A GIS-Based Multi-Criteria Analysis Framework to Evaluate Urban Physical Resilience against Earthquakes

As complex man-made systems that are home to the majority of the world population, cities have always faced a wide range of risks such as earthquakes. As the backbone of urban systems, physical components, including buildings, transportation networks, communication networks, and open and green spaces, are also vulnerable to disasters. To enhance the capacity to deal with disaster risks, enhancing urban resilience has recently become an essential priority for cities. This study aims to develop and pilot test a framework to evaluate urban physical resilience based on resilience characteristics and associated physical indicators. Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) was used to determine the relationships between physical indicators, and Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods were applied to determine the relative importance of the characteristics. The results showed that the ‘Robustness of Building’, ‘Building Density’, ‘Aspect Ratio’, and ‘Street Width’ are the most important among the twenty physical indicators considered in the proposed framework. Subsequently, the proposed framework was applied to one of the districts of Kerman, a major city located in the southwest, earthquake-prone part of Iran. Overall results indicate low levels of physical resilience. The findings of this study can provide urban planners and decision-makers with more transparent and practical insights into the physical resilience of cities. Results can also be used to design and implement policies and programs to improve the current conditions.

Selecting Disaster Waste Transportation Routes to Reduce Overlapping of Transportation Routes after Floods

Disasters have been a major subject of research considering damages caused in terms of losses of lives and properties and the functionality of critical services in cities. Floods generate large amounts of waste, causing several functional deteriorations, such as disrupted transportation, water supply, and wastewater management. Hence, it is necessary to establish an effective plan to secure urban resilience during the disaster response and recovery phases. This study proposes a method to reduce overlaps between disaster waste transportation routes and other emergency response activities after floods in the response and recovery phases. The network analysis of a geographic information system was used to analyze the supplying routes of evacuation, rescue/aid, hospital transportation, and police services for each disaster phase to reduce the overlapping of routes. The results showed that by using the proposed method, the average length of the disaster waste transportation routes increased by 25.29% and 9.80% in the response and recovery phases, respectively, whereas the length of the sections overlapping with the routes providing critical services decreased by 47.49% and 55.57% in the response and recovery phases, respectively. We believe that the proposed method identifies new corresponding key issues to establish disaster waste management plans to secure urban resilience after a disaster.

Evaluating the Implementation of the “Build-Back-Better” Concept for Critical Infrastructure Systems: Lessons from Saint-Martin’s Island Following Hurricane Irma

A limited number of studies in the scientific literature discuss the “Build-Back-Better” (BBB) critical infrastructure (CI) concept. Investigations of its operational aspects and its efficient implementation are even rarer. The term “Better” in BBB is often confusing to practitioners and leads to unclear and non-uniform objectives for guiding accurate decision-making. In an attempt to fill these gaps, this study offers a conceptual analysis of BBB’s operational aspects by examining the term “Better”. In its methodological approach, this study evaluates the state of Saint-Martin’s CI before and after Hurricane Irma and, accordingly, reveals the indicators to assess during reconstruction projects. The proposed methods offer practitioners a guidance tool for planning efficient BBB CI projects or for evaluating ongoing programs through the established BBB evaluation grid. Key findings of the study offer insights and a new conceptual equation of the BBB CI by revealing the holistic and interdisciplinary connotations behind the term “Better” CI: “Build-Back-resilient”, “Build-Back-sustainable”, and “Build-Back-accessible to all and upgraded CI”. The proposed explanations can facilitate the efficient application of BBB for CI by operators, stakeholders, and practitioners and can help them to contextualize the term “Better” with respect to their area and its CI systems.

Urban Form Resilience: A Comparative Analysis of Traditional, Semi-Planned, and Planned Neighborhoods in Shiraz, Iran

As cities are exposed to a portfolio of risks, the concept of resilience has risen to prominence over the past two decades. Consequently, a large volume of research has been published on different aspects of urban resilience. However, urban form resilience is still relatively understudied. As a step toward filling this gap, this study examines resilience of nine selected neighborhoods from Shiraz, an old Iranian city. The selected cases represent three different urban form patterns, namely, traditional, semi-planned, and planned. Different indicators related to the physical configuration of lots, blocks, open and green spaces, and street networks are used to examine resilience of each neighborhood to three major stressors, namely, earthquakes, extreme heat events, and floods. Additionally, a combination of Shannon entropy and the VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizcija I Kaompromisno Resenje in Serbian) method is used to rank the resilience of each neighborhood to each of the three stressors. Results show that, overall, the physical form of the planned neighborhoods is more conducive to urban resilience. In contrast, the urban form of traditional neighborhoods was found to be less resilient. There were, however, some variations depending on the type of stressor considered. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need to consider social and economic factors in future studies of urban form resilience.

Multi-Risk Climate Mapping for the Adaptation of the Venice Metropolitan Area

Climate change risk reduction requires cities to undertake urgent decisions. One of the principal obstacles that hinders effective decision making is insufficient spatial knowledge frameworks. Cities climate adaptation planning must become strategic to rethink and transform urban fabrics holistically. Contemporary urban planning should merge future threats with older and unsolved criticalities, like social inequities, urban conflicts and “drosscapes”. Retrofitting planning processes and redefining urban objectives requires the development of innovative spatial information frameworks. This paper proposes a combination of approaches to overcome knowledge production limits and to support climate adaptation planning. The research was undertaken in collaboration with the Metropolitan City of Venice and the Municipality of Venice, and required the production of a multi-risk climate atlas to support their future spatial planning efforts. The developed tool is a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS), which aids adaptation actions and the coordination of strategies. The model recognises and assesses two climate impacts: Urban Heat Island and Flooding, representing the Metropolitan City of Venice (CMVE) as a case study in complexity. The model is composed from multiple assessment methodologies and maps both vulnerability and risk. The atlas links the morphological and functional conditions of urban fabrics and land use that triggers climate impacts. The atlas takes the exposure assessment of urban assets into account, using this parameter to describe local economies and social services, and map the uneven distribution of impacts. The resulting tool is therefore a replicable and scalable mapping assessment able to mediate between metropolitan and local level planning systems.

Seismic Vulnerability Assessment Methodologies for Roadway Assets and Networks: A State-of-the-Art Review

Road networks are considered as one of the most important transport infrastructure systems, since they attain the economic and social prosperity of modern societies. For this reason, it is vital to improve the resiliency of road networks in order to function normally under daily stressors and recover quickly after natural disasters such as an earthquake event. In the last decades, vulnerability assessment studies for road networks and their assets gained great attention among the research community. This literature review includes a brief introduction about seismic vulnerability assessment, followed by the roadway assets damage and their damage states, and then the main typologies for the vulnerability assessment of roadway assets. Moreover, it focuses on available assessment methods, which were proposed to quantify the vulnerability of road networks and its assets. These methods are divided into two main categories, physical and traffic-based approaches. Methods based on fragility functions and vulnerability indexes were investigated in physical approach for roadways and its assets. On the other hand, accessibility and link importance index were explored in traffic-based approach for road networks. This paper reviews and comments the most common vulnerability assessment methods for road networks and its assets and points out their advantages and disadvantages. The main gaps and needs are identified and recommendations for future studies are provided.

Managerial Decision Making in Indicating a Disruption of Critical Infrastructure Element Resilience

Managerial decision making is an integral process used in public and private organizations. Critical infrastructure entities are a strategically significant group dependent on the quality of decision-making processes. They aim to provide services necessary to ensure state security and to satisfy basic human needs. The quality of decision making is an important factor in the management of these entities. The quality level is determined by many factors, the key of which is risk management. For this reason, it is necessary for the operators to minimize risks affecting the elements of the critical infrastructure through which these services are provided. Risk management is commonly used for this purpose, making it possible to assess and manage these risks. However, there is a specific group of threats that affects the resilience of these elements. The indication of these threats is not possible through common risk management. Therefore, it is necessary to develop specific scenarios of negative impacts and procedures for assessing their impact on the resilience of elements of the critical infrastructure. To this end, this conceptual article introduces an entirely new managerial decision-making process for indicating the resilience of critical infrastructure elements.

Urban Resilience Assessment: Mapping Knowledge Structure and Trends

The literature on urban resilience assessment has grown rapidly over the past two decades. This paper aims to provide a better understanding of the state of knowledge on urban resilience assessment through mapping the knowledge domain and highlighting emerging trends during different periods. The objects of study were 420 papers published in the Web of Science from 1998 to 2020. Science mapping was done using VOSviewer and CiteSpace, two widely known software tools for bibliometrics analysis and scientometric visualization. The results show that research published on urban resilience assessment was very limited and fragmented until 2009, and the focus has mainly been on risk mitigation and vulnerability assessment. The intellectual base grew between 2010 and 2014, when a paradigm shift from approaches based on robustness and reliability toward more adaptation-oriented approaches occurred. Finally, the annual publication trends have grown rapidly over the past five years and there has been more emphasis on climate change adaptation and flood resilience. Overall, in terms of dimensional focus, more attention has been paid to infrastructural, institutional, and environmental aspects at the expense of social and economic dimensions. In addition to information on thematic focus and evolution, this paper also provides other bibliometrics information on the influential authors, institutions, journals, and publications that lay the foundation of the field and can be used by various interested groups as points of reference to gain better knowledge about the structure and thematic evolution of urban resilience assessment. The paper concludes by highlighting gaps and making some recommendations for future improvement of the field. Major gaps are related to assessing resilience against socio-economic and health risks (e.g., economic recession and pandemics such as COVID-19).