Author(s)

Ehsan Abshirini¹, Daniel Koch², Ann Legeby²

¹Division of Geoinformatics, Department of Urban Planning and Environment, School of Architecture and Built Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
²School of Architecture, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.

Flooding is one of the most destructive natural disasters which have rapidly been growing in frequency and intensity all over the world. In this view, assessment of the resilience of the city against such disturbances is of high necessity in order to significantly mitigate the disaster effects of flooding on the city structures and the human lives. The aim of this paper is to develop a method to assess the resilience of a river city (the city of Gothenburg in Sweden), which is prone to flood Hazard, against such disturbances. By simulating flood inundation with different return periods, in the first step, the areas of impact are determined. To assess the resilience, two different methods are followed. One is a syntactic method grounded in the foreground network in space syntax theory and the other is based on measuring accessibility to the essential amenities in the city. In the first method, similarity and sameness parameters are defined to quantitatively measure the syntactic resilience in the city. In the next step, accessibility to amenities and the minimum distance to amenities before and after each disturbance is measured. The results, in general, show that such disturbances affect the city structure and the resilience of the city differently. For instance, the city is more resilient after flooding according to accessibility measures. This clearly means that the answer to the question of resilience is mainly dependent on “resilience of what and for what.”

Flooding, Resilience, GIS, Space Syntax, Accessibility

Abshirini, E. , Koch, D. and Legeby, A. (2017) Flood Resilient Cities: A Syntactic and Metric Novel on Measuring the Resilience of Cities against Flooding, Gothenburg, Sweden. Journal of Geographic Information System, 9, 505-534. doi: 10.4236/jgis.2017.95032.