Resilience Matrix for Comprehensive Urban Resilience Planning

The Resilience Matrix is a framework for the performance assessment of integrated complex systems. This chapter reviews the development of the matrix then describes two case studies and discusses lessons learned. The structure is a 4 × 4 matrix; the rows describe the four general management domains of any complex system (physical, information, cognitive, social) as described in the US Army’s Network-Centric Warfare doctrine and the columns describe the four stages of disaster management (plan/prepare, absorb/withstand, recover, adapt) as defined by the US National Academy of Sciences in their definition of disaster resilience. Collectively, these sixteen cells provide a general description of the functionality of a system through an adverse event. The matrix serves as an organizing framework for a screening-level assessment of the resilience of a system with respect to each critical service it provides. Indicators linked to each cell can be used to describe system performance and identify areas for further investigation. Additionally, the matrix framework can be used to organize the many government agencies and community institutions across different spatial scales that contribute to the operation of each critical service. In this way the matrix serves as a tool to initiate resilience planning and coordination, address jurisdictional issues, and identify gaps in the various roles and responsibilities for complex urban systems where human performance and decision making plays a critical role. The case studies described here (Rockaway, New York City and Mobile, Alabama, USA) are focused on coastal community resilience in the face of storm surge and flooding; however, the lessons learned speak to the broader contribution of the resilience matrix to the fields of risk assessment and urban planning.