A suite of built-environment oriented metrics for enhancing community resilience in high-density cities

Abstract

A robust, flexible, interconnected and smart built environment, including the building stocks and infrastructure systems, holds a prominent position in providing a livable and resilient society with economic vitality and sustainable development. The failure of any subdivisions could lead to cascading catastrophes to adjacent and/or interdependent components or even the dysfunction of the whole community. There has been increasing recognition that infrastructure resilience could help cities of various scales tackle the unprecedented challenges resulting from natural disasters, man-made threats, climate extremes and chronic stresses. While a variety of community resilience metrics, indicators and frameworks have been proposed, they may not satisfy the demands of high-density cities like Hong Kong in terms of enhancing the community infrastructure resilience against prevailing urban concerns such as congested living environment, deteriorated infrastructure facilities, shortage of quality infrastructure services and fragility of infrastructure system during the time of crisis. This paper aims to devise a suite of built environment oriented metrics for decision makers in high-density cities to optimize community infrastructure management and operation towards resilience and sustainability. The metrics are built by filtering out and synergizing critical built environment relevant indicators from published literatures and developing new ones to meet the urgent needs of high-density cities. A qualitative and analytical research method is adopted to design the indicators and categories of the proposed metrics; and quantitative and statistical methods are used for establishing the performance measurements. In addition, interviews with experts, government officials, and community stakeholders are convened to validate the research findings and unveil possible improvements for the proposed metrics. Finally, a case study is discussed by applying the proposed metrics for verification. Benefits and limitations are recognized in this paper as well.