Towards inclusive risk-informed infrastructure development in expanding cities.

Abstract

Conventional natural-hazard risk-modeling approaches do not consider possible unintended negative socioeconomic consequences of designing infrastructure expansions in a risk-informed way. Here, we propose a people-centered decision-making framework for urban infrastructure development that addresses this issue. The framework integrates a bespoke agent-based model that accounts for implications of variations in infrastructure expansion on dynamic land values and related residential location decision making. This means that the model captures macro-scale socioeconomic effects resulting from infrastructure development that are not explicitly related to natural-hazard events. The underlying algorithm balances these considerations with the successful operation of the infrastructure itself and the potential infrastructure performance losses that accompany a natural-hazard event. We demonstrate the framework by optimizing the expansion of transportation in a virtual urban testbed that imitates a typical expanding urban context in the Global South. This work can be used to guide inclusive risk-sensitive infrastructure planning in hazardous, rapidly growing cities.