T. Münzberg

Challenges in Establishing Cross-Border Resilience Urban Disaster Resilience and Security

This chapter focuses on resilience stakes that characterize urbanizing cross-border regions. While cross-border regions are characterized by multiple sources of vulnerabilities that are inherent to their development and history, knowledge remains partial in relation to how these regions address disasters that could affect both sides of the frontier. For decades, most cross-border regions have been expanding both from economical and institutional perspectives. In the meantime, urban density has been increasing, as well as the complexity of critical infrastructures—for instance, transportation or electricity distribution—that support essential services such as health care. Due to such complexity, these infrastructures represent major vulnerabilities for cross-border regions nowadays. In addition, borderland citizens’ behaviours remain uncertain, due to history and co-existing diverse cultural backgrounds. The chapter introduces the concept of resilience as a valuable lens to investigate disaster management of cross-border regions. More specifically, this chapter proposes to draw on resilience methodologies to address risks related to infrastructure, organization and behaviours in cross-border regions. By doing so, the chapter contributes to a holistic perspective on these vulnerabilities and their management when a disaster strikes. While a large spectrum of European projects has taken into consideration some of cross-border regions’ specificities, a comprehensive approach to cross-border resilience is still missing. We illustrate the relevance of this approach with the example of the French–German cross-border region. Going further, the chapter presents the INCA project that relies on multidisciplinary investigation of cross-border resilience and will deliver an agent-based model to support decision-making in cross-border regions facing disasters.

A Future-Oriented Agent-Based Simulation to Improve Urban Critical Infrastructure Resilience

The conversion to smart grids opens up a wide amount of possibilities to better control power distributions. The benefit is not only limited to a more secured and economical power distribution. It may also enable to bridge the gap between grid reliability management and disaster response. In particular under critical circumstances like grid instabilities, electricity may be missing or shortening. While distributing limited resources, the consideration of costumer’s performances, their criticalities and vulnerabilities regarding lack of electricity and other vital services, and the focus on a sufficient continued supply of critical services in an urban area may have a significant leverage effect on urban resilience. To benefit from this effect, we introduce and discuss the foundation of an agent-based system for the purpose of building urban resilience through a decentralized and agent-autonomous coordination of CI services in a city during an emergency situation. Therefore, we introduce the specification of decision-making in the context of critical infrastructures and disaster management in this chapter. Furthermore, we discuss the basic ideas of modelling critical infrastructures as agents and we demonstrate how their functionality is implemented in the model. A key topic of this chapter is a discussion about the design of the agent’s negotiation and its beneficial advantages in responding to critical infrastructure disruptions and in building more resilient cities.

Understanding Resilience: A Spatio-temporal Vulnerability Assessment of a Population Affected by a Sudden Lack of Food

Natural disasters such as massive floods and severe storms can lead to disorganizations of the food supply chain. A cutoff of the food supply chain is a worst case scenario in which the population is not able to buy food in stores for a couple of days. In this situation, the private food stock in households is the key self-helping capacity to cope with the effects of a sudden lack of food. In this paper a spatio-temporal vulnerability model is introduced to facilitate disaster preparedness and to enhance the understanding of resilience of the population in Germany. The model is indicator-based and uses the empirical data about the stock piling behavior of the population, statistical data about the population structure of different city districts, and the results of an expert survey to estimate the time-dependent vulnerability of a population derived from the continuous consumption of their private food stock. The paper includes a review about studies recently published about the empirical quantifications of food stocks in households in Germany and an evaluation of the expert survey. The model was applied to two cases of German cities to demonstrate and discuss its benefits.