The increased frequency of extreme events facing society is placing mounting pressure on cities and regions that need more robust resilience planning against growing uncertainty. Data augmented participatory methods, such as geodesign, offer much promise in supporting strategic planning to make our cities and regions more resilient. In that context, this study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of geodesign practices in resilience planning, through a systematic review of the selected 487 studies available from various bibliographic databases. The results indicate that a total of 75 studies were connected to resilience thinking, with a focus on climate change, floods, and sea level rise risks. A significant cluster of those resilience-related studies worked, especially, on improving sustainability. A detailed analysis of 59 relevant geodesign case studies revealed a strong underlying emphasis on disaster risk reduction and management activities. This study also noticed two prominent approaches among the analysed case studies to future city scenario planning: computational (41 studies), and collaborative (18 studies). It is recommended that an explicit integration of these two approaches into the geodesign approach can assist future city resilience planning endeavours. Thus, future research should further investigate the utility of integrating data-driven modelling and simulation within a collaborative scenario planning process, the usability of digital tools such as planning support systems within a collaborative geodesign framework, and the value of the plan’s performance evaluation during resilience decision-making. Another area for future work is increased community engagement in city resilience practices. The geodesign approach can provide a comprehensive framework for bringing communities, decision-makers, experts, and technologists together to help plan for more resilient city futures. Finally, while geodesign’s explicit role in empirical resilience implementations has been found to be low in this systematic review study, there are significant opportunities to support evidence-based and collaborative city resilience planning and decision-making activities.

This study portrays spatial and temporal vulnerability associated with seismic events for an urban area. It describes the vulnerability of a potentially earthquake-prone area for different time periods. The study assesses changes in earthquake vulnerability in relation to the changing distribution of human population over space with time. It has resulted with vulnerability maps showing vulnerability at working and non-working hours for the study area. The study has performed with a complex methodology linking a set of spatial and non-spatial database onto Geographic Information System environment and then analyzed to derive the study outcome on equal area hexagonal grid. In the outcome, the vulnerability has been presented in five different vulnerability scales ranging from Low to Extremely High. Occupational and residing density of population over available space has been used in computing urban vulnerability. Finally, the study has come up with a combined vulnerability map showing Very High vulnerable areas to earthquake damage throughout a day. As a whole, the study can potentially contribute in effective disaster risk management to minimize losses and thereby improving urban sustainability through the knowledge of spatial and temporal vulnerability.

The paper describes the development of a forecasting model to render most logical or probable urban expansion over the spatial region of an urban area. Prediction of urban growth is very important for development planning and policy making as well as for urban management. In this model, five different but equal influential factors of urban expansion choices have been integrated. Those factors are city’s future development master plan, spatial and temporal population growth pattern, land elevation, road connectivity and distance from existing urban center(s). The integration processes were performed on equal area hexagonal grid through geographic information system application. The location-specific information were extracted and overlaid on the hexagonal grid and classified into a scale of scores in order to compare the cells with one another. The model presumes that the higher the cell value is the higher the probability to be developed as urban. As a case study, the model delineated spatial growth of Dhaka city by the years of 2025 and 2040. There it has been observed that Badda, Khilkhet, Khilgaon, Jatrabari, Demra, Ashulia, Savar, etc. areas are supposed to be urbanized in the near future. Subsequently, a huge portion of flood flow zone are most likely to be developed as urban though those are non-urban areas as declared by the authority. On the other hand, the regions across the lying rivers in Dhaka Metropolitan area may face sluggish urban development despite closer proximity to core urban. Since the model portrays future expansion over the geographical regions, the urban planners and decision makers may utilize it in physical planning to guide future urbanization.

Worldwide, natural hazards have an increasing impact on ever expanding urbanised areas. Therefore, authorities need more sophisticated planning support systems (PSS) to enhance city resilience. This study explored the potential of a Cellular Automata-based model developed using Metronamica PSS for goal-oriented and collaborative resilience planning in the context of Greater Sydney, Australia. The process was embedded within a geodesign framework and participants (n = 19) collaborated in developing and validating four scenarios for 2050. The mitigating effects on the risks of bushfire, flood, and urban heat were analysed to support decision-making. The resulting Bushfire resilience scenario was significantly different from a present policy abiding, Business-As-Usual, scenario. This should encourage planners to consider the issue more closely. The study identified potential locations for resilient future growth, although additional land will be required by 2050, while medium-density developments were found to lessen urban heat impact. The research showed that city resilience scenarios can be constructed collaboratively using an advanced computer-based model, and stakeholders can understand such complex models, and participate in their improvement if the data and models are adequately shared. Future research can extend this approach by engaging the wider community in the scenario planning process.

Urban growth models are increasingly being used to generate scenarios within city and regional planning support systems (PSS). However, their usefulness in land use planning applications, particularly in city resilience planning, is not fully understood. Thus, we developed a cellular automata model using Metronamica PSS for the Greater Sydney region and assessed its usefulness as perceived by planning and policy practitioners. The study was implemented through a collaborative geodesign workshop where participants (n = 19) were guided to an understanding of the modelling process and to create and validate alternative policy scenarios for 2050 that reflected Business-As-Usual, Bushfire resilience, Flood resilience, and Combined resilience. We conducted two surveys and a SWOT analysis to assess the usefulness of the PSS and its outputs. We found that the PSS created credible scenarios using collaborative inputs from the participants. The PSS had perceived value for informing participants about land use changes in the resilience planning contexts with high flexibility and granularity. The plausibility of the scenario outputs, a usefulness parameter, was readily accepted, but the model’s transparency (another parameter) was seen as potentially inhibiting application in real-world planning. Future research should involve a broader audience, including the local community, in analysing the usefulness of PSS.