Building urban resilience: principles, tools and practice

This handbook is a resource for enhancing disaster resilience in urban areas. It summarizes the guiding principles, tools and practice in key economic sectors that can facilitate the implementation of resilience concepts into decisions over infrastructure investments and general urban management as integral elements of reducing disaster and climate risks. Resilience is the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner.1 Resilience in the context of cities translates into a new paradigm for urbanization and influences the way we understand and manage urban hazards, as well as urban planning in general. It provides a conceptual framework with practical rules of thumb that can guide stakeholders’ decisions to incorporate the management of disasters and climate risks into urban investments. In practice, operationalizing resilience is a challenging process. To facilitate this process, this book provides guidance on how to build urban resilience, primarily into critical infrastructure and the social realm, by reviewing available methodologies, tools and resources.