A Theory on Urban Resilience to Floods—A Basis for Alternative Planning Practices

By K. Liao. 2012

495 citations recorded by the source corpus.

River cities require a management approach based on resilience to floods rather than on resistance. Resisting floods by means of levees, dams, and channelization neglects inherent uncertainties arising from human-nature couplings and fails to address the extreme events that are expected to increase with climate change, and is thereby not a reliable approach to long-term flood safety. By applying resilience theory to address system persistence through changes, I develop a theory on "urban resilience to floods" as an alternative framework for urban flood hazard management. Urban resilience to floods is defined as a city's capacity to tolerate flooding and to reorganize should physical damage and socioeconomic disruption occur, so as to prevent deaths and injuries and maintain current socioeconomic identity. It derives from living with periodic floods as learning opportunities to prepare the city for extreme ones. The theory of urban resilience to floods challenges the conventional wisdom that cities cannot live without flood control, which in effect erodes resilience. To operationalize the theory for planning practice, a surrogate measure—the percent floodable area—is developed for assessing urban resilience to floods. To enable natural floodplain functions to build urban resilience to floods, flood adaptation is advocated in order to replace flood control for mitigating flood hazards.

Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Global and Planetary Change, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/204d7b7e0d74d53196544ac6d461497a13c6add2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

1. R. Villarroel Walker
2. Auroop Ratan Ganguly
3. M. Bruce Beck

In Global and Planetary Change

1. R. Villarroel Walker
2. Auroop Ratan Ganguly
3. M. Bruce Beck
4. V. Mishra

In Sociology and Political Science

1. R. Villarroel Walker
2. M. Bruce Beck

Citations in the corpus

• Changes in observed climate extremes in global urban areas (2015, background): “In the recent past, flood disasters have affected many large urban areas including Bangkok (2011), Brisbane (2011), Guangdong (2007), Mumbai (2005), and Dresden (2002) (Liao 2012).”
• Toward more flood resilience: is a diversification of flood risk management strategies the way forward? (2016, unknown): “Reliance only on flood defense and, seemingly associated, increasing capacity to resist is undesirable when taking into account current and potential future flood risks in times of urbanization and climate change (Holling and Meffe 1996, Kundzewicz and Takeuchi 1999, Liao 2012).”
• On water security, sustainability, and the water-food-energy-climate nexus (2013, background): “One senses, however, that this is something of an illusion, as Liao has recently remarked [3]:”