Resilience of Urban Infrastructure in Latin American Cities

Abstract

Resilience is the capacity of a society or infrastructure to resist, adapt, and recover after being impacted by an extreme event. In this chapter, the authors focus on measuring how much the road infrastructure is able to withstand the appearance of extreme events. An extreme event will be represented by an intentional (e.g., perpetrated attacks) or unintentional (e.g., as result of climate extreme event) damage on the routes or intersections of the road network within a city. To do this, the authors measure the primary characteristics of urban networks in order to understand their morphology (i.e., the way in which they were constructed). Then, they evaluated the resistance capacity of different points of the road networks with three types of attacks: random, directed, and localized. The first results of this study show the fragility of some roads and intersections before the appearance of extreme phenomena. These results can be exploited by those in charge of public management and then converted into policies.