Urban resilience : evaluating the adaptive capacity of cities towards a changing climate. Case study Vienna

Abstract

Urbanisation and increasing risks for natural hazards due to Climate Change will lead to a large number of people to be threatened by natural disasters in the future (IPCC, 2013; United Nations, 2012; Dilley et al., 2005). It will therefore become increasingly necessary to make cities more -resilient- to those risks. This thesis will first look at the outcome of recent urban planning practices to show the need for the rather new concept of urban resilience. It will be seen that deregulation under the neoliberal agenda and the increasing pressure of globalisation have destroyed the urban system-s self-regulating capacities and have led to high economic and social vulnerability (Eraydin, 2013). A new planning model should therefore aim at reducing these vulnerabilities by enhancing the system-s adaptive capacity, self-organisation, and transformability. Furthermore, the concept of urban resilience is the first to acknowledge uncertainties and the fact that cities are dynamic, socio-ecological systems interacting with their environment. Second, to provide a sound basis for this new model of planning, it will be evaluated whether there is a way to assess urban resilience. To this end different existing approaches will be compared (U.S. Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System Program, 2007; Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN), 2009; Prasad et al., 2009; Normandin et al., 2009; Tanguay et al., 2010) and it will be shown that the Climate Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI) is the first comprehensive approach to deal with the issue (Shaw and Sharma, 2011a; Climate and Disaster Resilience Initiative, 2010; Shaw and Sharma, 2011b). A case study on the city of Vienna, Austria, will demonstrate how the CDRI assessment method can be applied in practise and how the findings will give guidance for further planning action in the sphere of disaster risk reduction (DRR). It will be shown that while Vienna is generally well-prepared to handle disturbances, there are certain areas which still need improvement and that problems need to be tackled comprehensively. The index will therefore prove to be a valuable tool to reveal strengths and weaknesses of an urban system and to provide guidance for future policy-making.