Critical Infrastructure Analysis (CRITIS) in Developing Regions – Designing an Approach to Analyse Peripheral Remoteness, Risks of Accessibility Loss, and Isolation due to Road Network Insufficiencies in Chile

Modernizing societies become increasingly dependent on critical infrastructures (CRITIS), one of the most important of which is the road network. Road networks are vulnerable to hazards from the natural environment (e.g. extreme weather conditions, seismic and volcanic events, and landslides) and social environment (e.g. intentional attacks, traffic jams, roadblocks). Conversely, road networks impose vulnerability on their social environment (e.g. on people trying to leave disaster zones). Investigating the particular vulnerability of a given road network in order to increase its resilience is crucial for disaster risk reduction by spatial planning. However, in many cases in developing countries, the vulnerability of people still seems more pressing than the vulnerability of CRITIS. This paper develops an approach for investigating road network vulnerability in developing regions, using a Chilean example. However, the approach is sufficiently generic to be applied to comparable situations in other countries.