Towards resilient cities: development of a city resilience assessment tool

Abstract

Cities are increasingly suffering impact and damages from climate change and disasters, creating extensive harm to society, infrastructures, economy and environment. Therefore, increasing cities' resilience level is vital to better deal with future disasters and guarantee the safety of the population. First, the resilience level of the cities should be assessed. This research presents a city resilience self-assessment tool designed to assist decision-makers in assessing their cities' resilience level from a multidisciplinary approach. It aims to be applied by the cities to define the policies to be implemented to enhance resilience, illustrate the current situation and evolution over time, and provide a benchmark with similar cities. Building on the SMR Resilience Maturity Model (SMR RMM), which provides a roadmap of policies to enhance city resilience, this research introduces an innovative self-assessment tool. The paper details the process followed in its development, outlines the steps involved, and presents the results achieved. The tool is composed of three integrated parts: a self-assessment questionnaire to gather data on the city's resilience level derived from the policies defined in the SMR RMM, a prioritization model developed using Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) method to define the order in which the city should implement the policies, and a dashboard to illustrate the results of the questionnaire and the prioritization model. This tool has been evaluated through a pilot test in a city in northern Spain through interviews with two departments of the city council which assessed the usefulness, relevancy and correctness of the tool.