The concept of resilience is used in multiple scientific contexts, being understood according to several different perspectives. Essentially, resilience identifies the capability to recover, absorb shocks, and restore equilibrium after a perturbation. Recently, resilience is triggering increasing interest in engineering contexts, referring to communities and urban networked systems, as the capability to recover from natural disasters. The approach to the engineering resilience dates back to the early 1980s, when Timmerman defined resilience as “the ability of human communities to withstand external shocks or perturbations to their infrastructure and to recover from such perturbations”. In this paper, a literature review of the existing methodologies to quantify urban resilience is presented according to a civil engineering perspective. Different approaches, for diverse applications, are examined and discussed. A particular focus is done on the studies from Cavallaro et al. and Bozza et al., approaching disaster resilience of urban environments to natural hazards according to the complex networks theory.

Prompt and efficient responses against natural hazards are needed to build cities capable of withstanding disasters, namely resilient cities. This study aims at presenting and testing synthetic resilience indices over a real urban center threatened by multiple hazards, for which a global overview of city performance is requested. An integrated framework is proposed for quantitative resilience assessment by way of time‐independent synthetic indices. The approach proposed is in accordance to the complex network theory and uses a global indicator of the system connectivity to assess the city functioning also in case of network disruption. Resilience is evaluated as a proxy for systemic urban damage by modeling a city ecosystem as a hybrid social–physical network. Seismic and landslide scenario analyses are performed for the city of Sarno, Italy. A probability‐based approach is used to compute urban vulnerability. Subsequently, to highlight changes in results according to the type of disaster, a recovery strategy is simulated to assess efficiency and damage states in each recovery stage, and urban resilience.

Resilience represents a key issue for modern societies. Resilience is related to sustainability as safeguarding environmental assets can reduce risk and provide resources to facilitate recovery. The methodology quantifies the disaster resilience of city ecosystems by measuring urban efficiency in the event of shocks, according to an anthropocentric perspective. Cities are modelled as hybrid social–physical networks (HSPNs), accounting for interrelations between the physical and social components. Seismic scenarios are run on diverse urban shapes and on the real case study of the city of Sarno. Results on synthetic HSPNs show consistency with the real case study, therefore the validity of the model is highlighted. Urban shapes or forms prove to have a significant impact on urban efficiency in terms of service delivery, and on urban disaster resilience. The methodology proposed in this paper could be a useful tool for urban planners, particularly in cities with high exposure to natural disasters.

EPJ Web of Conferences, open-access proceedings in physics and related sciences