Building Resilient Cities with Integrated Resiliency Analyses

From a regional development perspective, making our communities and regions more resilient to disruptions, whether from natural or human-induced events, is imperative, not only to preserve our way of life, and life itself, but also to limit our long-term global expenditures related to climate change–related disasters, both slow-moving and sudden. There is concern over the potential for more frequent and more intense weather-related disruptions; however, our ability to assess our current state and our potential to increase our long-term resilience capability is critical to attaining and maintaining community resilience. In this chapter, we present a general discussion of the foundational characteristics of community resilience and why a systems-level view of resilience is required to study, model, and assess community resilience. We also explore interconnections and dependencies among community systems, how a change in one component can have cascading impacts, and the importance of including the populations who are ultimately impacted by these issues in the discussion. We discuss how resilience can be assessed and present case examples for emergency response systems assessment. Finally, we frame the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) regional pandemic experience and then pose specific COVID-19 local pandemic case studies focused on the United States and explore how similar methodologies may be applied to assess capacity of communities in the GCC.