Mapping urban resilience to disasters - A review

Maps and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are widely used to better understand and manage risks in modern cities. While methods for mapping hazard, vulnerability and risk are well established, mapping resilience in urban areas poses a challenge as there are no agreed-on methodological approaches for doing so. This paper surveys proposed methodologies and approaches for mapping urban resilience to disasters. Our review shows that (1) adaptive resilience is mapped after a disaster mainly through the measure of recovery and inherent resilience is mapped using top-down approaches. Regarding inherent resilience (2), very few methods have been applied at city scale; (3) the limit between resilience and vulnerability mapping is still narrow and may cause confusion for decision makers; (4) the choice of variables and indicators to measure and map resilience is often a function of data availability and reliability; (5) indicators developed in one specific context should not be applied systematically to other contexts as resilience is a context-dependent concept; (6) most resilience maps are based on an analytical approach and do not reflect the systemic property of resilience.