1.0 Introduction

In recent decades, the world has become increasingly urban. Today it is estimated that 50% of the world’s population live in cities and this trend is likely to continue into the future, with an estimated 70% of the world expected to be urban dwellers by 2050 (United Nations, 2012). This rapid expansion of cities is exposing a larger number of people and critical infrastructures to the threat of disasters and crisis events and posing additional challenges for the design, planning and management of urban areas. Indeed, a number of high impact crisis events over the past two decades have highlighted the vulnerability, complexity and interdependency of contemporary urban infrastructure systems.

Within this context, the enhancement of urban security has become a far more urgent and significant task, necessitating more innovative and integrated approaches to urban planning and development. These events have also been catalytic in advancing the political prioritisation of enhanced security and risk management strategies for many European cities, and led to calls for new approaches and mechanisms for preparing, responding to and recovering from all manner of disruptive events. In line with this, the concept of resilience – typically presented as the ability of cities to ‘bounce back’ or even ‘bounce forward’ from a disturbance or crisis event - has gained increasing attention within the field of urban planning (Davoudi, 2012; Majoor, 2015).

Within the planning domain, ‘resilience’, has entered into discourse with different orientations. Although the focus has traditionally been placed on environmental issues, in particular the reduction or mitigation of environmental risks such as earthquakes, floods, and global warming, there has been a rather significant increase of the fields where the concept is used. The expansion of the concept has also inevitably led to problems of certainty and clarity around what sense and meaning the concept actually assumes in urban planning discourses, as well as in its translation into planning policy and practice. Thus there remains debate around how ‘resilience’ can be best operationalised within planning – with commentators asking, for example, what exactly does it mean to be resilient within an urban context (Desouza et al, 2012)?

This paper is particularly concerned with the resilience of large scale urban built infrastructure – both critical and non-critical. It seeks to explore how urban decision makers, specifically planners, can be best supported in seeking to enhance the security and resilience of such developments. Specifically, the paper focuses on the potential role technology can play in augmenting the role of urban planning in meeting this important objective. In doing so, the paper presents emerging findings from two large scale EU funded research projects – HARMONISE and RESILENS. Both projects are broadly concerned with the development of e-tools and processes to equip urban decision makers with the capabilities and relevant knowledge to enhance the resilience of existing and future urban development projects. As

such, the paper first presents some of the key challenges faced by urban decision makers in seeking to operationalise the resilience concept in practice; it then focuses on the subsequent development and refinement of the HARMONISE and RESILENS concepts. The paper concludes with some emerging lessons around operationalising ‘resilience’ for the planning, development and operation of large scale urban built infrastructure, and the implications of such lessons for urban e-planning.

2.0 Urban Resilience – From ‘bouncing back’ to ‘bouncing forward’?

One of the first tasks for HARMONISE and RESILENS was to examine the theoretical underpinnings of the resilience concept, and its emergence across various national states, highlighting the importance of context in its overall impact and implementation. The term ‘resilience’, according to Pizzo (2015) can be traced back to the 1st Century B.C. Yet it is the work of theoretical ecologist, C.S Holling, which brought the concept to prominence in the 1970s. Holling used resilience to examine the behaviour of ecological systems that are exposed to unexpected external changes and disruptions, defining resilience as ‘‘A measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or stated variables” (Holling, 1973: 14). Since then, resilience has been examined in a variety of different areas including environmental studies, disaster prevention and climate change reduction strategies. It has also continued to expand as an adapted research concept within social and human geography studies (Kärrholm, Nylund & de la Fuente 2014) and more recently, applied specifically within the urban context. Indeed ‘urban resilience’ is typically presented as the capacity of cities to ‘bounce back’ or even ‘bounce forward’ from a disturbance or crisis event.

Within his work, Holling drew an important distinction between engineering and ecological notions of resilience – with engineering resilience understood as the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium or steady-state after a disturbance (Holling, 1973). This engineering perspective views resilience as a measure of the ‘speed of return’ to equilibrium (Pimm, 1991). Essentially, the quicker the system ‘bounces back’, the more resilient it is. In contrast, Holling (1996: 33) asserts that ecological resilience is concerned with the “magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed before the system changes its structure”. Thus, rather than speed being a defining feature, here ‘resilience’ is understood as how much disturbance a system can undergo while remaining within critical thresholds – how it can persist and adapt in the face of disturbance (Adger, 2000:1). While these perspectives each present a different understanding of ‘resilience’, both acknowledge the existence of equilibrium in systems, be it a pre-existing one to which a resilient system bounces back (engineering) or a new one to which it bounces forth (ecological) (Davoudi et al, 2012). Yet many scholars argue that such an equilibristic view may be somewhat problematic when applied to the urban context (Alexander, 2013; Davoudi et al, 2012); giving rise to calls for an ‘evolutionary’ understanding of resilience (Davoudi, 2012; Majoor; 2015). This evolutionary understanding of resilience purports that resilience should not be seen as ‘bouncing back’ to normality (as

with engineering perspectives), but as the ability of complex socio-ecological systems to change, adapt, and, crucially, transform in response to stresses and strains (Carpenter et al, 2005).

According to Olsson et al (2006), such an evolutionary understanding of resilience brings the role of institutions, leadership, social capital and social learning into the scope of resilience. Ultimately it is not ‘the city’ that acts in the face of a crisis event or disturbance, but individual or collective actors, and it is their actions that bring about change (or not) (Lang, 2011). The potential of this understanding is also noted by DeVerteuil (2015:27) who proposes that resilience ‘should impart a sense of adaptive capacity, a productivity and potential for learning – it is produced and earned rather than being an inherent property’. This view of the concept fits with the overarching objectives of the HARMONISE and RESILENS projects, which seek to offer a more holistic framework for urban resilience enhancement, through emphasis on creating online ‘learning’ portals, which direct urban decision makers to appropriate tools and guidance documents for such activity. Ultimately, these projects see value in the resilience concept as it can ‘offer an integrated approach for coping with all manner of disruptive events, as well as a new way to engage with future uncertainty’ (Coaffee and Clarke, 2016).

2.1 Urban Planning and Crisis Events – An Evolving Challenge

As stated in the UNISDR report ‘Making Cities Resilient’ (UNISDR, 2012),

‘‘[there is] a mounting recognition that disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and sustainable development are inextricably linked. These issues present mutually dependant challenges, which require collaborative, integrated strategies, strong governance, and innovative technological and financial solutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in cities. Complex, unique in their political and economic structures, and widely varying in the vulnerabilities they face, cities—and the growth they will experience over the next two decades—will give way to some of the 21st century’s most important social and economic challenges and opportunities”

The capacity of cities to mitigate, prepare, respond or recover from these challenges, and how such capacities can be enhanced, has become a critical urban policy question. Indeed, recent decades have seen the growth in importance of concepts like ‘resilience’, with ideas connected to this concept permeating through a range of disparate disciplinary areas, a range of policy narratives, worlds of professional practice and the popular media. From the perspective of built environment professionals, including planners, attaining resilience often requires an enhancement of urban planning and design techniques in order to make cities and associated critical infrastructure more resistant to exogenous shocks. Yet despite this, as Coaffee and Clarke (2015) argue, tensions continue to exist regarding the extent to which principles underpinning resilience can become practically enmeshed within the formal planning processes of urban areas. Indeed, policies that promote urban resilience do not

always arise from a specific or explicit resilience objective per se, and where they do the synergies often emerge in an ad hoc way through a combination of other initiatives which aim to secure against future adversity.

Urban planning has long had a role in securing cities against a range of threats. However, to date many security or resilience related urban interventions have tended to be focussed on particular buildings, structures or local areas in a relatively fragmented way. Moreover, some urban planning / design approaches directed at crime prevention (including terrorist attacks) have raised questions around the extent to which cities can adopt protective policies without losing their openness, pluralism and vibrancy (Savitch, 2015). Indeed, a vast body of literature has emerged over the course of the last two decades which debates the ‘militarisation’ or ‘securitisation’ of cities in response to crime and fears of crime, and also as a reaction to terrorist attacks. For example, Coaffee (2013) refers to international reactions to ‘post 9/11 anxieties’ and reactive and obtrusive measures which were used to protect key government assets within urban areas, whilst simultaneously serving a political purpose in terms of visibly demonstrating that the state was acting to protect the nation from terrorism.

Today however, a much wider range of public spaces and urban infrastructures have been viewed as potential targets for terrorism. These so called ‘soft targets’ are those key infrastructures or resources which usually lack proper security or are difficult to defend because they are open to the public by their very design (such as shopping centres or streets, public transport nodes, business districts) (Bennett, 2007). In contrast, ‘hard targets’, or critical infrastructure (CI) typically have restricted access, making attacks more difficult. However, attacks against these types of infrastructure are not unpreventable. Indeed, the attack on Brussels Airport in March 2016 exemplifies this fact (an event which was linked with a near simultaneous attack on the Brussels metro system – a soft target).

Moreover, an integrated and holistic approach to resilience is especially important due to the increasing system complexities and interdependencies associated with current CI systems, where the cascading effects of a system breakdown on other interconnected systems (Rinaldi et al, 2001) could significantly affect public safety, security, economic activities or environmental quality of their coverage areas, and in turn could negatively affect the overall wellbeing of the affected urban society. A vivid example of cascade failure in CI and its importance in the urban sphere, is provided by the events following the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001 (O'Rourke, 2007):

“The WTC disaster provides a graphic illustration of the interdependencies of critical infrastructure systems. The building collapses triggered water-main breaks that flooded rail tunnels, a commuter station, and the vault containing all of the cables for one of the largest telecommunication nodes in the world.”

Yet, it is not only terrorist or crime events which cities, and urban planners, must work to mitigate against or prevent. Natural disasters and man-made accidents can also have catastrophic impacts on the normal functioning of cities and regions. Moreover, the

significant shifts in climate variables projected for the 21st century, coupled with the observed impacts of ongoing extreme weather and climate events, ensures adaptation to climate change is set to remain a pressing issue for urban areas over coming decades (Carter et al, 2015). Indeed, there is now widespread recognition that the spatial configuration of cities and towns and the ways in which land is used and developed have significant implications for both adaptations to the adverse impacts of climate change and reduction of the emissions that are causing change (Davoudi et al, 2009). Davoudi et al further contend that such recognition of the complexity, uncertainty and irreversibility demonstrated by climate science is changing the nature and framing of spatial planning, with an increasing expectation for it to play a part in mitigation and adaptation efforts. However, although some cities are making progress on adaptation, with ‘global’ cities such as London and New York possibly recognising the threat that climate change poses to their economic competitiveness, adaptation is by no means firmly embedded throughout the activities of the majority of cities and urban areas (Carter et al, 2015).

In seeking to plan for and respond to the aforementioned range of increasingly diverse threats to cities, urban planners must be part of a more integrated urban management nexus. Indeed ‘urban resilience’ must be seen as a collective responsibility, one which is most effective when it involves a mutual and accountable network of civic institutions agencies and individual citizens working in partnership towards common goals within a common strategy (Siemens, 2012). Urban resilience can thus shape the way we perceive the challenges cities face, as well as provide a framework by which to respond. However, as Coaffee and Clarke (2015) assert, the key role of training and skills development to raise awareness of options that are available to all built environment professionals involved in urban decision making processes, or that hold a stake in developments is vital. This, the authors argue, can come through student centred courses or through continual professional development, where adaptive capacity skills can be forged in a multidisciplinary and multi-professional environment, mirroring the complex reality of urban resilience problems on the ground. Orchestrating such a coherently joined approach to building and planning resilient cities will be a significant challenge for all built environment professionals – including planners – over the coming decades. Such a challenge requires a range of new and innovative approaches to collaborative working and education – a task which may be significantly enhanced through new and emerging technologies. Indeed, this paper, and the research projects from which it stems, pose the following pertinent question - what opportunities can new technologies offer as catalysts for overcoming some of the challenges facing collaborative working and education around the security and resilience of cities?

2.2 Introducing HARMONISE and RESILENS

As outlined in the previous section, the rapid political ascent of the ‘resilience’ concept raises a number of important questions around how resilience is understood, what it is designed to achieve, and how this may translate into practice (O’ Hare and White, 2014). This paper explores the efforts of two pan-European research projects – HARMONISE and RESILENS,

in seeking to answer or address these pertinent questions, taking large scale infrastructure projects as an example. HARMONISE (A Holistic Approach to Resilience and Systematic Actions to Make Large Scale Urban Built Infrastructure Secure), funded under the EU Seventh Framework Programme, ran from 2013-2016 and focussed on the resilience of non-critical large scale urban built infrastructure projects. Such projects can be defined as those infrastructure developments which receive a large number of visits on a regular basis, are strategically significant during crisis time, are particularly sensitive to risk, or which have significant urban importance or value – but which are not essential to the everyday functioning of the city (as with critical infrastructure). Examples of such developments include institutional and public buildings, city attractions and entertainment centres, commercial centres, or transportation nodes.

In contrast, RESILENS (Realising European ReSiliencE for CritIcaL INfraStructure), funded under the EU Horizon 2020 Programme, and running until 2018, focusses on critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure (CI) provides the essential functions and services that support European societal, economic and environmental systems. The removal or suspension of critical infrastructure assets from normal service would significantly affect public safety, security, economic activity or environmental quality. A breakdown in any one of these assets alone can bring about catastrophic consequences, but it is the interdependency of these systems, and by extension, the cascading effects of a breakdown in one system on other interconnected systems, which is of most significant concern (O’ Rourke, 2007).

Broadly, the overarching objective of both projects relates to operationalising the concept of resilience for large scale infrastructure projects, and the enhancement of the security and resilience of such projects through the development of comprehensive, holistic online decision support platforms for CI stakeholders and other built environment professionals (such as urban planners, architects, engineers or local politicians). These Platforms, accompanied by a range of online tools and guidance documents, aim to ensure that the design and planning of such large scale urban built infrastructure more comprehensively considers security aspects within an integrated and dynamic process. Indeed, the HARMONISE project stemmed from an emerging recognition that there was no comprehensive, holistic approach to improve the resilience and security of large scale urban built infrastructure. While vulnerabilities to terrorism and natural disasters of our urban areas, together with the mechanisms to address them, continue to be studied, no holistic approach had been formulated to develop a systematic approach to the design and planning of large scale urban built infrastructure.

2.3 Establishing the ‘State of the Art’

Initial work within the HARMONISE and RESILENS projects aimed to establish a clear understanding of the European urban resilience context or ‘landscape’ and culminated in an exposition of the existing challenges, emerging gaps and trends in policy and practice. This

section provides an overview of this process to date, which has involved extensive literature review and several stakeholder engagement exercises across Europe.

The emergence of ideas and practices of resilience within academic and policy debates and their relative influence on practice are highly specific to institutional contexts and emergent security risks faced in particular countries and their urban areas. For example, in the UK, the USA and Japan resilience became a highly politicised policy rhetoric in the wake of natural and human induced disasters (most notably 9/11, 7/7 in London, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012, and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011) and concerns that the infrastructural system and institutional frameworks in situ were ill-prepared to cope with similar future events (HARMONISE D1.1, 2013). However, for much of mainland Europe, the connection between city planning and resilience has emerged more slowly and has predominantly been associated with climate change adaptation and inland flooding (Fungfled and McEvoy, 2012).

Within the UK, for example, Coaffee (2013) argues that a number of different ‘waves’ of resilience can be observed in UK politics and policy making over the last decade, proposing that changing practices of resilience have emerged both as a function of time and in relation to a range of changing socio-political and economic pressures which have re-articulated the meaning and operational function of resilience as it has evolved. Coaffee further states that the direction of UK resilience policy has responded to the changing targeting preferences of international terrorists, economic recession and increased pressure to adopt climate adaptation strategies, as well as a renewed interest in localist thinking in urban planning. An increasing integration of a range of resiliency practices at the local level, Coaffee asserts, represents the next generation of resilience thinking that urban professionals, communities and individuals will be increasingly asked to adopt. Yet the question of who will take responsibility for their implementation is an important one – both for the UK and across Europe.

In addition, the RESILIENS project found that despite the clear parallels between the emergence of resilience and CI as mainstream policy concerns, there has been relatively little interconnection between, research, theory and practice within the sector (RESILENS D1.1, 2015). Early attempts to mitigate vulnerabilities in CI have tended to utilise conventional risk management approaches, but struggled with complexity, interdependency and potential uncertainties, as well as economic and organisational issues and the growing threat of cyber-attacks; thus the interest in resilience approaches has grown (O'Rourke, 2007). This relationship and engagement with risk while elucidating CI resilience has been contested in the literature (Suter, 2011; Linkov et al, 2014; Sikula et al. 2015). Within this context, a number of ‘perspectives’ on risk and resilience can be identified, as currently practiced by CI sectors (Fig.1)

Perspective Resilience as… Definition1 A goal of risk Many documents describe resilience as the

management overarching goal of protection policies and risk management as the method to achieve this goal. Resilience replaces or complements the concept of protection, which was previously defined as the goal of risk management activities.

2 A part of risk management

Resilience is understood as a part of risk management. Activities to strengthen resilience are needed in order to deal with the so-called “remaining risks”, i.e. risks that have not been identified or underestimated and are thus not covered by appropriate protection (preventive) measures.

3 An extension of risk management

This transitionary perspective recognises the importance of risk management to CI operation, but proposes that these practices need to be extended to encompass resilience practice that integrates social and organisational factors, as well as building capacity to change.

4 An alternative to risk management

Challenges the traditional methods of risk management and promotes resilience as a new way of dealing with risks in a complex environment. It is argued that a probabilistic risk analysis is not an adequate approach for socio-technicalsystems that are confronted with non-linear and dynamic risks and are themselves characterized by a high degree of complexity. Instead of preventing risks and protecting the status quo, such systems should enhance their resilience by increasing their adaptive capacities.

Fig. 1. Perspectives on Resilience and Risk Management (RESILENS D1.1, 2015, adapted from Suter, 2011)

Perspective 3 was formulated for the RESILENS project (RESILIENS D1.1, 2015) and is based on the recognition that whilst risk assessment is fundamental to CI practice at present, there is a requirement to extend this process to consider resilience as part of a more dynamic system that includes social, technical and organisational factors. Furthermore, this perspective can be considered as one of transition to the more transformative understanding of resilience as offered by perspective 4.

Stemming from the opportunities and limitations addressed above, early work within HARMONISE sought to identify a number of key resilience ‘pillars’ or requirements, which

can be brought together by a range of stakeholders, at multiple scales, to pursue resiliency objectives within urban policy and practice. Such pillars can be defined as follows –

A greater requirement for foresight and preparedness: In this sense, resilience is proactive, rather than reactive, bringing together the components of the disaster cycle – mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery (O’Brien and Read, 2005).

A requirement to consider multiple risks and hazards in a holistic manner: developing urban resilience policy and practice that can respond in a flexible and integrated fashion to multiple risks across a range of cascading scales

A need for integrated governance of the response: The new governance approach to enhancing urban resilience emphasises joined-up approaches to decision-making (vertical and horizontal integration). Whereas traditional approaches to urban risk have relied upon a narrow range of stakeholders, contemporary and future schemas should look to draw a full range of professional and community groups into decision-making at a range of spatial scales; from locally-coordinated systems to centralised and sub-national organisation.

(HARMONISE D1.1, 2013)

However, in seeking to implement or address the requirements above, it is necessary to develop a more comprehensive understanding of national policies and associated responsibilities for dealing with disruptive challenges across Europe – which differ across nations and are influenced by historic policy developments and national government structures. Indeed, this paper asserts that an understanding of the varied institutional contexts in which these activities take place is critical in developing a more holistic solution to urban resilience across the EU and internationally: e.g. how different stakeholders are integrated in the development and implementation of policy; how policy is adapted and operated at different spatial scales; how such policies are co-ordinated across different spatial scales to ensure holistic governance.

2.3.1 Case Study Workshops and ‘Gap’ Analysis

Within the HARMONISE case study cities, stakeholder engagement workshops were held with built environment professionals to ascertain their experience and knowledge of the resilience concept. Importantly, the workshops also afforded the opportunity to identify the use of, need for and requirements for tools and services which could enhance understanding and application of the resilience concept in practice. The results of the workshop revealed a number of important ‘gaps’ within current European resilience policy and practice. These (HARMONISE D1.3, 2013) were identified as follows:

1. Lack of a Clear, Holistic Vision of Urban Resilience

Resilience considerations are currently incorporated into the urban planning and management process through a number of disparate approaches. There is a general feeling among

practitioners, however, that resilience is often incorporated ‘without realising it’ rather than through a more proactive, co-ordinated and holistic approach. As such, lack of awareness of the concept and its associated applications contributes to a lack of strategic vision. This gap also manifests itself in the following major challenges:

A) General lack of awareness of the Urban Resilience concept: o The term ‘resilience’ is not used in some member countries of the

European Union, it has no specific translation in some languages (eg. Finland) and therefore its meaning has remained ambiguous.

o Urban resilience is still considered an abstract concept and it is mainly used in policy and strategy papers and among experts.

o In the context of forward planning (or strategic / spatial planning), ‘resilience’ as a concept or a set of principles is generally not explicitly used.

o Discourse of resilience is often considered to sound ‘negative’ by policy makers, elected representatives and the development industry. Using terms like ‘vulnerability’; ‘threat’; ‘security’ and ‘safety can heighten public fears. As such a more positive or public perception conscious language is required, along with the desire of practitioners to use these terms.

B) Lack of integration and coordinationo There is often a lack of horizontal and vertical integration between actors

and agencies responsible for urban resilience. This is clearly exposed in the responses to the stakeholder engagement exercise, which revealed that such integration can be hindered by differing conceptualisations of ‘resilience’ issues across disciplines and spatial scales.

o For urban resilience to be successful it is essential that better relationships are formed between those that build, those that manage and those that use urban spaces.

o Generally, architectural liaison with the police and emergency rescue services occurs too late in the design process to have a meaningful impact on design. As a consequence, security considerations can be dealt with through a series of ‘add on’ measures such as bollards rather than integrated into the design concept, which can compromise the design quality of a scheme.

o Measures’ may not necessarily be preventative in nature but can also be used for damage limitation and making contingency response more efficient and effective. The latter is best included as part of the design process to be more cost effective.

o This situation is exacerbated by a lack of a single point of ownership in government, lack of leadership and political support and the need to consider multiple viewpoints in a transparent and participatory process.

2. Need for a more comprehensive approach

A) Resilience discourse (when used) is typically applied to the development management process in the form of sector based risk assessments (for example, flood risk assessment) and the resilience discussions/planning that organisations such as IT/finance have as a matter of urgency as key to business survival.

B) Other approaches to address these issues exist to a degree, but they tend to be hazard or event specific

C) Existing tools and approaches adopted are considered to be limited in terms of addressing ‘urban resilience’ more widely.

3.0 The HARMONISE and RESILENS Contribution

The central aim of the HARMONISE and RESILENS projects is broadly to facilitate the adoption of a more holistic, integrated approach to enhancing the resilience of large scale urban built infrastructure (critical and non-critical). Both projects sought to address some of the ‘gaps’ or shortcomings of the resilience concept identified above, through the development of a suite of online resources for built environment professionals or other key urban decision makers. This section provides an overview of the specific contribution of each project.

3.1 HARMONISE

The general aim of HARMONISE – A Holistic Approach to Resilience and Systematic Actions to Make Large Scale Built Infrastructure Secure – was to develop a comprehensive, multi-faceted, yet mutually reinforcing concept for the enhanced security, resilience and sustainability of urban infrastructure and development. HARMONISE aimed to result in resilience enhancement methods for large scale urban built infrastructure.

One of the primary intended outputs of the HARMONISE project was an advanced online Platform, the purpose of which is to facilitate the adoption of a holistic and integrated approach to urban resilience. The HARMONISE Platform enables stakeholders with varying educational and professional backgrounds to contribute and collaborate in the planning, design, construction, operation and management of urban built infrastructure. The HARMONISE Platform acts as a ‘one stop shop’ for resilience information and guidance, providing a comprehensive selection of the most relevant information on urban resilience, selected by the top European experts in this field and supported with the real life knowledge created by several case studies. It includes semantic intelligence, which enables better understanding of data, linkages between unstructured information and tools, and more sophisticated answers to users’ various needs. Furthermore, the Platform also hosts eight newly developed HARMONISE tools, which were created and tested by the HARMONISE partners (in addition to a range of already existing online resources and guidance).

In developing the Platform, two overarching requirements were identified as follows:1. Information which is readily accessible and of use to a range of end-users; and 2. A process of accessing this information which assists users in enhancing the resilience of large scale urban built infrastructure – and which promotes more holistic and integrated decision making.

To achieve this central goal, the HARMONISE Platform is structured by the Thematic Framework, which provides a ‘tagging’ system for all information and tools hosted within. This structuring is important as it forms the basis for the Platform search functionality, and ensures that users receive search results which are relevant for their specific needs. The user is encouraged to follow an innovative step-by-step search process, selecting search criteria from a number of overarching themes such as ‘Infrastructure Type’; ‘Hazard Type’ or ‘Resilience Cycle Stage’ (an indicative layout for this search process is illustrated in Figure 2 below). This step-by-step process is important as it highlights and builds awareness around the differing resilience needs at various points of intervention (differences between the planning stage and operation stage, for example) and around the various resilience cycle stages (mitigation interventions prior to an extreme event and recovery interventions after an event, for example).

The framework emphasises to the user that resilience is a process rather than an ‘end point’, and as such encourages continuous reviews of plans over time. Furthermore, the search themes (and subsequent search results) are not organised around particular built environment disciplines. Rather, the process seeks to promote interdisciplinary working, allowing the user to gain insight into potential resilience issues or opportunities in other related sectors and works towards building mutual objectives and addressing disciplinary differences. Collaborative working is of utmost importance particularly when faced with an extreme event as such disturbances often highlight the interdependencies in urban built infrastructure. The collapse of the World Trade Centre towers during the 9/11 attacks, for example, caused extensive damage to the slurry wall or ‘‘bathtub’’ that surrounded the buildings’ deep basements. Had the slurry wall failed, this would have resulted in the wholesale flooding of New York’s underground rail transit system which would have untold implications in terms of additional fatalities. Thus achieving a ‘holistic approach’ to the development and protection of large scale urban built infrastructure is essential, with an awareness of where failure in one building/building complex can lead to a cascade of failures elsewhere.

Figure 2: The HARMONISE ‘Thematic Framework’

Ultimately, the HARMONISE Platform aims to support the planning, design, construction and operation/management of urban built infrastructure by creating an environment that fosters mutual understanding and potentially leads to a shared and more harmonised vision of urban resilience. The platform utilises appropriate representation techniques and mechanisms that enable different processes related to urban resilience development and management to become more understandable, which reduces, for example, the knowledge and communication gaps between urban resilience stakeholders.

3.2 RESILENS

The RESILENS project is currently ongoing and is concerned with planning and managing Critical Infrastructure (CI). The project defines resilience in the following manner:

“Resilience is the ability of a system or systems to survive and thrive in the face of a complex, uncertain and ever-changing future. It is a way of thinking about both short term cycles and long term trends: minimizing disruptions in the face of shocks and stresses, recovering rapidly when they do occur, and adapting steadily to become better able to thrive as conditions continue to change. Within the context of CI, the resilience process offers a cyclical, proactive and holistic extension of risk management practices.” (RESILENS D1.1, 2015)

Over the course of the project, RESILENS will develop a European Resilience Management Guideline (ERMG) to support the practical application of resilience to all CI sectors.

Accompanying the ERMG will be a Resilience Management Matrix and Audit Toolkit which will enable CI systems (encompassing assets and organisations) quantitatively and qualitatively index their level of resilience. The proposed toolkit will also allow for the quantitative analysis of the resilience of the CI systems at different spatial scales (urban, regional, national and trans-boundary), which can then be iteratively used to direct users to aspects of their systems where resources could be concentrated in order to further improve their resilience levels. The ERMG and resilience management methods will be tested and validated through stakeholder engagement, table-top exercises and three large scale pilots (transport CI, electricity CI and water CI). The ERMG and accompanying resilience methods will be hosted on an interactive web based platform, the RESILENS Decision Support Platform (RES-DSP). The RES-DSP will also host an e-learning hub that will provide further guidance and training on CI resilience. Overall, RESILENS will aim to further advance the state of the art in CI resilience management and intends to increase and optimise the uptake of resilience measures by CI stakeholders.

4.0 Implications and Opportunities for E-Planning

According to Silva (2015), the last few decades have seen urban planning experience major changes associated with the extensive use of information and communication technologies in the different stages of the planning process. A variety of new planning methodologies, made possible by the widespread use of web based tools and other digital technologies has offered exciting new opportunities for innovation in the planning profession. Similarly, in the field of emergency management, a wide array of new online tools have been developed to aid stakeholders in crisis situations. For example, remote sensing and GIS are increasingly utilised to monitor emergencies, to locate damaged areas, and to assess severity. In the event of a crisis, information sharing and communication in order to facilitate coordination is vital. Indeed, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the US Secretary of Homeland Security expressed disappointment that response efforts were ‘significantly hampered by a lack of information’ and information sharing on the ground (Chertoff, 2005).

Efforts to enhance information sharing and collaborative working between various stakeholders involved in emerging response is essential – and work in this area is continuing to advance. However, most online tools for emergency management are focussed almost exclusively on this response stage – with much less attention paid to mitigation, preparedness or recovery efforts. Such stages of the disaster cycle require greater input from a far larger pool of urban decision makers, including built environment professionals such as planners. It is this core gap which HARMONISE and RESILENS aimed to address, through an examination of the resilience concept, and how it could be operationalised in practice as a framework for collaborative, coordinated and integrated working.

The task of mitigating against, preparing for, responding to and recovering from the vast range of existing and emerging threats facing cities is a complex and increasingly challenging one for urban planners. However, despite this, training for planners in this area has been

traditionally lacking (Tickle, 2008). HARMONISE and RESILENS thus sought to provide a source of information, tools and guidance for built environment professionals which also serves as an educational resource. Within the HARMONISE Platform, for example, users are expected to go through an innovative search process based around the Thematic Framework. The aim of this search process is to enable a more comprehensive consideration of the interlinkages between different disaster cycle stages, and between different infrastructure systems, while simultaneously introducing users to a range of tools for different resilience tasks.

Within the Platform, amongst other tools, is a specific ‘educational tool’. This tool is presented as a multimedia interface which allows the user to investigate the urban resilience milieu in one’s own time in an easily digestible format. It is designed to interpret the HARMONISE holistic resilience message and to provide intuitive links to the HARMONISE platform and tools. The tool presents typical urban images at the centre of a dashboard type display. The dashboard has both input ‘sliders’ (such as risk, cost and aesthetic appearance) and risk type (natural or terrorism) and output indicators (such as safety, economic performance and ‘net cost’). The tool allows users to experiment between a sharp focus on initial cost and an emphasis on aesthetic design and enables users to see that significant trade – offs exist and that a balanced approach provides the best net cost compromise. The tool has an obvious educational operating environment, as a ‘jumping off point’ for further study in the resilience field. It also has a possible ‘operational deployment’ role in locations experiencing resilience challenges of a complex nature and who are undertaking disruptive physical prevention and /or mitigation public works (HARMONISE D5.3, 2016).

As Silva (2012), asserts, within the field of urban planning, researchers and practitioners depend quite heavily on government and private organisations for textual or visual data to fulfil part of their information needs. For that reason, the internet can be a valuable research resource. Indirect online data collection from secondary digital sources, such as online official statistics, government reports, guidance documents, are mostly freely available or much less expensive that data collected directly by the researcher. However, it is often difficult to source particular types of online data – particularly with regards ‘fuzzy’ concepts like resilience. Indeed, as the results of HARMONISE have shown, a range of valuable guidance documents and tools exist which indirectly deal with or address resilience considerations (often without using the ‘resilience’ term). HARMONISE has brought these tools and guidance together in one place, situating their use within a wider resilience context, and emphasising the need to consider the use of such tools in an integrated manner.

5.0 Conclusions

This paper sought to explore the concept of ‘urban resilience’ and its potential application within the field of urban planning. In particular, it demonstrated some of the core practical challenges of operationalising the concept in practice, based around results from case study workshops across Europe. HARMONISE in particular found that just as there is lack of

‘joined up thinking’ at a strategic level, this is an issue which is propagated vertically within organisations and discipline groups. This is often manifested as a fundamental lack of training, especially within the built environment professions, in urban resilience issues and the approaches and tools which can be utilised to address them. As highlighted by the stakeholder engagement process, often it is not a lack of tools which inhibit resilience policy and practice but a lack of skills and knowledge needed to maximise their potential.

Training the next generation of young professionals to work in an interdisciplinary way and equip them with the skills and knowledge to think and practice in a resilient way is now a pressing priority throughout Europe. The situation is exacerbated by a lack of effective, holistic education tools. In addition, adaptation of critical infrastructure (CI) standards and design methodologies to address both natural and man-made threats to citizens, assets and socio-economic wellbeing requires a well-developed resilience concept to ensure urban resilience implementation in wider society. Some progress has been made, for example in Spain, a new critical infrastructure protection law was developed in 2008 as a starting point. Its current status reflects the need to protect critical infrastructure from extreme threats and determine responsibilities. However, implementing urban resilience more widely to address longer term more strategic challenges across is still under developed and more political, policy and practitioner effort is needed. This paper sought to highlight some of the potential opportunities and challenges in attempting to pursue this important goal, together with highlighting the contribution of online Platforms, tools and guidance in expediting progress in this crucial area.

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