1,720,967 research outputs found
Embodying resilience in urban development processes: suggestions for the future
No full textThe contribution was addressed to explore the main features of a resilient urban system, providing hints for future urban developmen
Enhancing Resilience in face of complex hazardous events: from a conceptual framework toward operational tools
No full textLiterature in disaster field and past events highlight that urban disasters are more and more complex: since the end
of Nineties, the complexity of modern disasters [U+F02D] due to changes of hazards, exposure and vulnerability
of territorial systems and to the interactive mix of such changes [U+F02D] has been stressed and the fact that,
namely in large cities, hazards were shifting from individual phenomena towards an interactive mix of natural,
technological and social events has been underlined (McEntire et al. 2002). Urban disasters, as demonstrated by
events like the Kobe earthquake or the Katrina hurricane, are often characterized as complex chains of hazardous
events, impacts and damages, difficult to prefigure, in face of which cities are less and less resilient.
With respect to these events, the need for a “revolution” in approaching the “disaster problem” and its relevance
for a future sustainable development of urban areas has been largely recognized.
Resilience seems currently represent the key concept for a “shift in thinking” in the field of disaster analysis and
management, due to the opportunity that it provides for dealing with concepts like surprise, cross-scale effects,
non-linearity, change, which are very relevant in complex urban disasters.
According to the ISDR glossary on Disaster Risk Reduction (2009) resilience refers to “the ability of a system,
community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a
hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic
structures and functions”.
Nevertheless, although research in the field of natural hazards has largely evolved in the last decades, focusing
more and more on vulnerability and more recently on resilience [U+F02D] both of them currently invoked as
basic means for supporting risk mitigation strategies [U+F02D] up to now a shared theoretical and operative
approach to resilience is still missing. A nourished scientific literature has been developed according to the idea
that reducing vulnerability in face of a given hazard should have surely led to enhance resilience and reduce the
overall risk. Nevertheless, past disasters analysis clearly reveals that mitigation measures addressed to reduce
vulnerability do not necessarily result in an enhancing of resilience.
Thus, based on a research work developed within the 7FP Ensure Project, this paper is addressed to provide a
conceptual framework for interpreting and analyzing resilience, as a key tool for driving risk mitigation strategies
toward an enhancement of urban resilience in face of complex hazards.
In detail, starting from the evolutionary path of the resilience concept and the variety of definitions and specifications
up to now provided (Paton and Johnston, 2001; Godshalk, 2003; Bruneau et al. 2003; Adger et al. 2005;
Norris et. al. 2008), the main attributes, properties or capacities able to make an urban system resilient in face of
complex hazards have been identified. Then, by integrating different approaches and disciplinary perspectives,
these capacities and their mutual influences have been arranged into a three-ring model in respect to the main
phases of the disaster cycle. Finally, based on the conceptual framework, the main indicators for assessing, in
quantitative and/or qualitative terms, urban resilience in face of complex hazards have been provided
Vulnerability across space: a focus on the underlying mechanisms
No full textVulnerability is widely recognized, both in scientific literature and institutional documents, as a key-component of risk, crucial for improving risk knowledge, assessment and management. In the last decades, vulnerability has been largely investigated according to different aims and disciplinary perspectives: nevertheless, the challenge for integrating current approaches has to be still faced and many gaps related to vulnerability understanding and measuring have still to be bridged.
Despite some scholars have clearly outlined that “vulnerability rests in a multi-faceted coupled system with connections operating at different spatio-temporal scales” (Turner et al. 2003), till now vulnerability is often represented as a static and crystallized feature of elements/systems or, according to Roberts et al. (2009), “as a static factor” rather than a process, neglecting in such a way the significant changes affecting both its facets and the relationships among them over time and across space. Hence, a clear idea of the path to be followed for analyzing and measuring the time and spatial dependency of vulnerability (Birkmann, 2006) and for grasping its dynamic nature is still missing.
For long, vulnerability has been associated, up to an absolute identification, to the concept of damage even though, according to a shared interpretation, it can be more precisely defined as “the characteristics and circumstances of a community, system or asset that make it susceptible to the damaging effects of a hazard” (UNISDR, 2009). The UNISDR glossary (2009) highlights that vulnerability concept includes numerous aspects - arising from physical, social, economic and environmental factors - and that it significantly varies over time, but does not emphasize the variability of vulnerability, and of its different aspects, across space despite the entity and the far-reaching dimensions of the consequences produced by such a variability, as largely shown by recent disasters.
Even if different from each other, the concepts of vulnerability and damage are closely related and the recognition of damage patterns may represent one of the key-tool for in-depth analyzing some aspects of vulnerability not sufficiently investigated up to now. Accordingly, Cochrane (2004) states that “damages are displaced geographically and temporally”. Therefore, looking at the different phases following the impact of a hazardous event, might the analysis of the spatial distribution of damage help us to better understand factors and mechanisms able to induce a displacement of vulnerabilities across space?
The present work aims at answering this question; in detail, grounding on some case studies, an overview of the main spatial mechanisms that can favor the displacement and the change of vulnerability across space and some hints devoted to an in-depth conceptualization of the spatial dynamics of vulnerabilities will be provided
Enhancing urban resilience in face of climate change: a methodological approach
Full text linkClimate change can be considered as one of the main environmental topic of the 21st century (IPCC, 2011). It poses a serious challenge for cities all over the world (EEA, 2012): cities show, on the one hand a high level of vulnerability in face of climate change, on the other hand, they are responsible for 60% to 80% of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which represent the main causes of change in climate conditions.In 2011, the 73% of European population was living in urban areas and the level of urbanization is expected to be at 82% by 2050 (UN, 2012). Due to the evidence that in Europe the 69% of all GHG emissions are currently generated by cities, larger and larger is the attention devoted, by scientific literature and policy makers, to outline strategies for urban adaptation to climate change, both at European and local scale.Governments and scholars currently highlight the need for strengthening urban resilience in face of climate change and related consequences. By this perspective, some actions are already running, even though a clear identification of the features which make a city resilient in face of climate change is still missing.To fill this gap, this contribution is mainly addressed to:- provide, by integrating different disciplinary perspectives, a conceptual model of the set of adaptive capacities and properties that characterize a resilient system;- verify, starting from a snapshot of current strategies and actions for urban adaptation currently implemented at European level, the consistency between those strategies and the identified set of resilience capacities and properties
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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