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The interconnected nature of urban resilience planning and what this means for asset managers
ur world is changing. Extreme events are becoming less predictable with greater consequences. Infrastructure hardening alone is proving both inadequate and unaffordable. Resilience is not about preventing change – change is inevitable – rather, it is about managing change and adapting, responding, and recovering from disruptive events. How we manage change will be defined by how we manage the risk context, using urban planning to reduce the consequence of shocks and stimulate the collective ability to respond and recover. By focusing on people and the community operations that support their lives as the essential purpose of resilience, we can focus our actions more effectively. Infrastructure is built to support a purpose. That purpose does not disappear during a shock. Therefore, we should plan and design infrastructure and services to support the continued delivery of that purpose. When we define the relationships between infrastructure systems we can map the flow of consequence and from this build a “system of systems” approach to city operations and how infrastructure enables it. Cities are typically functioning more and more as clusters, which are collocations of resource demand. When these have a single source dependency, they are thought of as being dependency clusters. In a catastrophe, these dependency clusters can dominate a particular resource demand, becoming a critical dependency cluster, and potentially prevent a city from self-recovering. When looking at urban resilience to climate change and the role and characteristics of building assets in that mix, we AUGUST SEPTEMBER 2013 AUGUST APRIL MAY SEPTEMBER 2015 2013
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need to look at how these assets connect to the urban system of systems and view climate change as an aspect of the all-hazards context, now and over the life of the property. There are generally thought to be around a dozen trends affecting urban infrastructure, including income disparity; food deserts; health; and equity of access to services. However, in investigating the relationship between infrastructure within communities and the risk context, the trends most likely to change the value of real estate assets are concentration of value; market tolerance; hazard awareness; and insurance loss profile.
Concentration of Value Technological change in communications and information processing has undergone an accelerating evolution over the last three decades, bringing us to the verge of a revolution in how we communicate and conduct operations. This has concentrated operations, both increasing the value of the operation and the cost efficiency, emphasising income disparity as middle skill jobs disappear. The corollary is that the cost of loss or interruption is higher than ever. Secondly, it means that the cost of the property relative to the operation is reducing rapidly. The old paradigms of “one-third of operation value is personnel, one-third of personnel is infrastructure” is gone. It is only a matter of time before infrastructure becomes a rounding error in the operation value estimation. However, the consequence of an infrastructure failure is now far higher than ever before. Concentrating value also tends to be accompanied by singularity of function or clustering, creating single source dependencies.
Resilience is th changes in the quickly from a objects canno self-recover. It tions and ope
Market Tolerance 9/11 had a general market tolerance of business interruption of two weeks. By Hurricane Katrina that was reducing and in the Calgary flood of 2013 it was three to four days. We are generally advising clients to aim to start recovery by 8:00am the next working day. During the South Germany flooding, many By Alexander H. Hay
building.ca
15-05-25 11:57 AM