Resilience, space syntax and spatial interfaces: The case of river cities

Resilience defined as the capacity of a system to manage impacts, keep its ef-ficiency and continue its development has been scrutinized by researchers from different points of view over the past decades. Due to the prominence of resilience in urban planning, this paper intends to find out how the spatial structure of cities deals with disturbances, and if geographical phenomena such as rivers affect the resilience in cities. Using the space syntax methods syntactically analyze the resil-ience in cities, we innovatively introduce two measures; similarity and sameness. These measures are in relation with the syntactical properties of cities and com-pare the degree of resilience between different groups. Similarity measures the degree to which each city retains the relative magnitude of its foreground network after a disturbance and sameness is the degree to which each city retains the same segments as its foreground network after a disturbance. Likewise to network resil-ience studies, we apply different disturbances on cities and explore the reaction of cities to disturbances in terms of size of the foreground network and which seg-ments are parts thereof. We then compare different groups based on these mea-surements as a method to analyze sameness and similarity. The results show that the resilience, in the way we define it, is different in different cities depending on in which view and based on which parameters we are discussing the resilience. Additionally morphological phenomena such as rivers have a great impact on the structure of cities and in turn on their resilience.

PDF

___

Albert, R., Jeong, H., and Barabá-si, A. L. (2000). Error and attack tolerance of complex networks. Na-ture, 406(6794), 378-382.

Bankes, S. C. (2010). Robustness, Adaptivity, and Resiliency Analysis. In AAAI Fall Symposium: Complex Adaptive Systems.

Bavelas, A. (1950). Communication patterns in task-oriented groups. Jour-nal of the acoustical society of America.

Carpenter, A. (2013). Disaster Re-silience and the Social Fabric of Space. In Proceedings of Ninth International Space Syntax Symposium ). Sejong Uni-versity Press.

Carter, J. G., Cavan, G., Connelly, A., Guy, S., Handley, J., and Kazmierczak, A. (2015). Climate change and the city: Building capacity for urban adaptation. Progress in Planning, 95, 1–66. http:// doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2013.08.001

Cutini, V. (2013). The city when it trembles. Earthquake destructions, post-earthquake reconstruction and grid configuration. In: Kim, Y. O., Park, H. T., Seo, K. W. (eds), Proceedings of the Ninth International Space Syntax, Seoul: Sejong University.

Cutini, V., and De Pinto V. (2015). On the slopes of Vesuvius: Configura-tion as a thread between hazard and opportunity, Proceedings of the 10th International Space Syntax Sympo-sium, London, UK.

Dalton, CR. and Kirsan. C. (2005). Graph Isomorphism and Genotypical Houses. Proceedings of the 5th Inter-national Space Syntax Symposium, Volume II, edited by Akkelies van Nes 15-17. Delft: Techne Press.

Dou, K., & Zhan, Q. (2011). Acces-sibility analysis of urban emergency shelters: comparing gravity model and space syntax. In Remote Sensing, En-vironment and Transportation Engi-neering (RSETE), 2011 International Conference on (pp. 5681-5684). IEEE.

Esposito A., and De Pinto V. (2015). Calm after the storm: The configura-tional approach to manage flood risk in river cities. Proceedings of the 10th In-ternational Space Syntax Symposium, London, UK.

Folke, C. (2006). Resilience: the emergence of a perspective for social– ecological systems analyses. Global en-vironmental change, 16(3), 253-267.

Freeman, L. C. (1977). A set of mea-sures of centrality based on between-ness.Sociometry, 35-41.

Galderisi, A. (2014). Urban Resil-ience: A framework for empowering cities in face of heterogeneous risk fac-tors. A|Z ITU, 11(1), 36-68.

Ghedini, C. G., and Ribeiro, C. H. (2011). Rethinking failure and attack tolerance assessment in complex net-works. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 390(23), 4684-4691.

Grünewald, F., and Warner, J. (2012). Resilience: buzz word or useful concept? http://www.urd.org/RESIL-IENCE-buzz-word-or-useful?

Haan, J., Kwakkel, J. H., Walker, W. E., Spirco, J., and Thissen, W. A. H. (2011). Framing flexibility: Theorising and data mining to develop a useful definition of flexibility and related con-cepts. Futures, 43(9), 923-933.

Haklay, M., and Weber, P. (2008). Openstreetmap: User-generated street maps.Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 7(4), 12-18.

Hillier, B. (1996). Space is the Ma-chine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press.

Hillier, B. (2009). Spatial sustainabil-ity in cities: Organic patterns and sus-tainable forms. In: Koch, D., Marcus, L. and Steen, J. (eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh International Space Syntax Symposium, Stockholm: Royal Institute of Technology, p.K01.1-K01.20

Hillier, B. (2016). What are cities for? And how does this relate to their spatial form?

Journal of Space Syntax, 6(2), 199-212.

Hillier, B., and Hanson, J. (1984). The social logic of space. Cambridge univer-sity press.

Hillier, B., and Iida, S. (2005). Net-work and psychological effects in ur-ban movement. In Spatial information theory (pp. 475-490). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Hillier, B., Yang, T., and Turner, A. (2012). Normalising least angle choice in Depthmap-and how it opens up new perspectives on the global and local analysis of city space. Journal of Space Syntax, 3(2), 155-193.

Holling, C.S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4, 1–23.

Holling, C.S. (1996). Engineering re-silience versus Ecological resilience. In Engineering with ecological constraints. National Academy, Washington D.C.

Holme, P., Kim, B. J., Yoon, C. N., and Han, S. K. (2002). Attack vulner-ability of complex networks. Physical Review E, 65(5), 056109.

Hu, Z., and Verma, P. K. (2011). Topological resilience of complex networks against failure and attack. In Advanced Networks and Telecom-munication Systems (ANTS), IEEE 5th International Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

Iyer, S., Killingback, T., Sundaram, B., and Wang, Z. (2013). Attack ro-bustness and centrality of complex net-works. PloS one, 8(4), e59613.

Koch, D., and Miranda Carranza, P. (2013). Syntactic Resilience. In Pro-ceedings of Ninth International Space Syntax Symposium. Seoul: Sejong Uni-versity Press.

Koch, D. (2013). The architectural interface inside out. In Proceedings of Ninth International Space Syntax Sym-posium. Seoul: Sejong University Press.

Latora, V., and Marchiori, M. (2003). Economic small-world behavior in weighted networks. The European Physical Journal B-Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, 32(2), 249-263.

Leichenko, R. (2011). Climate change and urban resilience. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainabil-ity, 3(3), 164–168.

Markus, T. (1993). Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Ori-gin of Modern Building Types.

Marcus, L., and Colding, J. (2014). Toward an integrated theory of spatial morphology and resilient urban sys-tems. Ecology and Society, 19(4). http:// doi.org/10.5751/ES-06939-190455

Pickett, S. T. A., Cadenasso, M. L., and Grove, J. M. (2004). Resilient cit-ies: meaning, models, and metaphor for integrating the ecological, so-cio-economic, and planning realms. Landscape and Urban Planning, 69(4), 369–384. http://doi.org/10.1016/j. landurbplan.2003.10.035

Read, D. (2005). Some observations on resilience and robustness in human systems. Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, 36(8), 773-802.

Reid, R., and Demarin, P. (2013) The importance of urban resilience, World Economic Forum, http://forumblog. org/2013/01/the-importance -of-ur-ban-resilience/#disqus_thread, Ac-cessed 8/20/2015.

Rose, A. (2007). Economic resil-ience to natural and man-made di-sasters: Multidisciplinary origins and contextual dimensions. Environmental Hazards, 7, 383-398.

Sari, F. and Kubat, A.S. (2011), Syn-tactic properties of evacuation and access routes in earthquake vulnera-ble settlements. In: Greene, M., Reyes, J. and Castro, A. (eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International Space Syntax Symposium, Santiago de Chile: PUC, p.8038:1-8038:11.

Shpuza, E. (2006). Floorplate Shapes and Office Layouts: A model of the ef-fect of floorplate shape on circulation integration. Atlanta: Georgia Institute of Technology.

Shpuza E. (2007). Urban shapes and urban grids: a comparative study of Adriatic and Ionian coastal cities. Pro-ceedings of the 6th Space Syntax Sym-posium, 9.1-9.22. Istanbul.

Shpuza, E. (2011). A coupled configurational description of boundary shape based on distance and direction-ality. Artificial Intelligence for Engineer-ing Design, Analysis and manufactur-ing, 25(04), 357-374.

Shpuza, E. (2013). Foreground Net-works during Urban Evolution. In Pro-ceedings of Ninth International Space Syntax Symposium. Sejong University Press.

Shpuza, E and Peponis, J. (2005). “Floorplate Shapes and Office Layouts.” In Proceedings to the 5th Internation-al Space Syntax Symposium, Volume II, edited by Akkelies van Nes, 89-102. Delft: Techne Press.

TERI. (2009), ‘Nanotechnology De-velopments in India: a Status Report’, The Energy and Resources Institute, New Delhi.

Turner, A. (2007). From axial to road-center lines: a new representa-tion for space syntax and a new model of route choice for transport network analysis. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design, 34(3), 539-555.

United Nations International Strate-gy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR), (2009). Geneva, Switzerland.

United Nations, Department of Eco-nomic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2014). World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, High-lights (ST/ESA/SER.A/352).

Wang, J. (2015). Resilience of Self-Organised and Top-Down Planned Cities—A Case Study on Lon-don and Beijing Street Networks. PLoS one, 10(12), e0141736.

Weichellgartner, J., and Kelman, I. (2014). Challenges and opportunities for building urban resilience. A|Z ITU, 11 (1), 20-35.

Wilbanks, T. (2007). “The Re-search Component of the Communi-ty and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI)”. Presentation at the Natural Hazards Center, University of Colora-do-Boulder.