Urban Resilience and Earthquake Engineering

Systems Thinking for Urban Resilience: An Integrated Approach to Natural Hazards

Background and Rationale

Urban areas are defined by physical landscapes that are simultaneously structural (the built environment) and functional (the dynamic flows of people, resources, goods, and services). The resilience of these landscapes to shocks and stressors is a multidimensional attribute that emerges from complex patterns and interactions among buildings, critical infrastructure systems (e.g., transport, energy, water), and socioeconomic systems, values, and functions. These urban systems are highly vulnerable and increasingly exposed to natural hazards, especially earthquakes, floods, and climate‑related shocks. Building urban resilience therefore demands a multi‑hazard, multi‑risk approach that recognizes how disasters often trigger cascading effects far beyond visible physical infrastructure. This perspective is especially urgent for megacities, particularly in Asia, where compounded risks from natural hazards, climate change, and vulnerable essential infrastructure converge. Considering this background, there is a critical need to place urban resilience at the forefront of the research agenda. Innovative approaches are required to enhance resilience against a spectrum of challenges, in alignment with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). Achieving these global objectives requires promoting system models that integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches in urban environments.

Analytical Foundations of the Systems Approach

The distinction of a system-oriented perspective here lies not simply in invoking multiple disciplines; it is primarily the utilization of a formal framework that treats urban environments as complex adaptive systems. These systems consist of interdependent layers of interaction that generate new (emergent) types of risk through interactions at the interfaces between those layers. The three primary analytic techniques being utilized to represent this systems view include network analysis, multi-layered graph theory, and agent-based modeling. Each represents an example of how to apply these views on complexity to analyze, model, and predict failure patterns based upon dependencies and failures that may occur across infrastructure and socio-economic sub-systems. This special issue seeks to utilize systems thinking as an underlying methodological orientation, i.e., all submissions are expected to consider the relationship structure of the urban environment's various components and therefore address the physical, social, and institutional dimensions as interdependent and not as parallel independent issues.

Indicative Topics:

This special issue of the UREE Journal invites original research articles, reviews, and case studies that adopt a systems thinking approach to urban resilience. We seek contributions that integrate urban built environment, buildings, and infrastructure; as well as socio-economic and disaster response dimensions into coherent, actionable frameworks across different scales and timeframes. This special issue welcomes submissions addressing the above-mentioned areas of research, with the topics of interest including, but not limited to:

1. Systems modelling and network analysis for urban risk and resilience modelling and assessment.
2. Urban buildings (housing, school, hospitals, public service, commercial, etc.) risk and resilience assessment using a system approach
3. Urban transportation, water, power, gas, communication, industrial and energy-related infrastructure risk and resilience assessment using a system approach.
4. Cascading and compounding effects in interdependent urban systems.
5. Integrating social, economic, and environmental values into resilience metrics.
6. Application of artificial intelligence, machine learning methods, and algorithms in urban systems to natural hazards.
7. Decision support tools for resilience enhancement under deep uncertainty.
8. Policy and governance frameworks that bridge tangible infrastructure and intangible community values