Comparative study of infrastructure resilience policies and practices for bay areas

Abstract

Infrastructures provide a large number of fundamental and necessary systems, facilities and services that underpin the prosperity, sustainable and balanced development of a country, region, city and other areas and communities. Recent studies have defined the concept of infrastructure resilience as an ability of an infrastructure system to cope with, resist, absorb, recover from or adapt to unanticipated disruptions. The four well-known bay areas in the world – San Francisco, New York, Tokyo and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau bay areas – have already implemented a variety of policies and practices focusing on regional infrastructure resilience within city clusters respectively. However, there are less comparative studies about the common grounds and differences among them. This paper aims to compare different policies and practices presented by four well-known bay areas in the world in order to identify gaps and common grounds between the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau bay area and the other three ones. Comparative case studies are conducted on the four bay areas to obtain a holistic understanding on the infrastructure resilience policies and strategies the areas have adopted to tackle their common natural and man-made hazards. First, the concepts of regional infrastructure resilience and city cluster, as well as the basic information of the four bay areas are summarized and introduced. Second, their infrastructure resilience policies and implemented measures are reviewed irrespectively for tackling increased flooding, sea level rise and their influence on infrastructure lifeline systems including transportation through the region, water network, and pipeline system. Finally, common ground, differences and gaps of infrastructure resilience among the four bay areas are analyzed from the following points of view: policies, research metrics, research framework, implemented measures and future development direction.