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This paper aims to propose the practice of urban resilience to flooding in a vulnerable Asian city, Taipei. It conducts Geographic Information System (GIS)-based simulations to assess Taipei’s vulnerability under a set of varying flooding scenarios and likelihoods. This research concludes by proposing remedies to fill the gaps these flood simulations reveal and, in doing so, promotes urban resilience in Taipei. This paper provides an example of urban resilience to flooding for other cities in Asia.

The paper undertakes a case study of Taipei to survey current practices and historic analyses as a tool to evaluate a chronology of policies implemented to make Taipei resilient to flooding. It also conducts flood simulation and scenario analysis through the technology of GIS by using ArcMap 10.2.2 software to gauge the vulnerabilities in Taipei. These GIS-based data sets are collected from Taiwan’s central and local governments. This paper analyzes the vulnerability of population, land value, residential properties, GDP and critical facilities, such as major subway stations, medical centers, public schools, major public buildings, electric power substations and gas/oil stations. Additionally, it analyzes the likelihood and cost and benefit of different flooding scenarios based on typhoon and rainfall data sets in 1975-2014 period. After a thorough analysis of vulnerability, likelihood of flooding and cost–benefit analyses, this research develops Taipei resilience policies to address the vulnerabilities.

The findings indicate that Taipei case study, a chronology of policies implemented to prevent flooding, explains that costly engineering structures, rebuilding and fortification against floods eventually created a false sense of security, which has encouraged more intensive residential and commercial developments in flood-prone areas, and led to a higher level of vulnerability. Additionally, flooding simulations indicate that 40 per cent of Taipei City is located in flood risk areas in an extreme weather scenario. This percentage is higher than other global cities such as London’s 15 per cent, Tokyo’s 10 per cent and New York City’s 25 per cent. Based on the 10 per cent of total flooding areas above 0.5 m, the vulnerable population is estimated at 200,000 people, or 7 per cent of the total population. The GDP impact will be more than $28bn. More than $67bn of land value is vulnerable. A least one million subway passengers will be affected each day. Further, there is little evidence that the urban poor are particularly vulnerable to floods. On the contrary, some neighborhoods with high-income households face a higher risk of floods. Very few medical centers, oil and gas stations and electrical power substations are located in flood-prone areas, but a large number of public schools, administrative buildings and major subway stations are susceptible. Additionally, the likelihood analysis of flooding in an extreme rainfall scenario concludes that the possibility will be five times that of the existing assumption with a flood in every 200 years. Thus, Taipei City’s infrequent once-in-two-century floods are likely to occur more frequently.

This paper provides a thorough analysis of vulnerability, likelihood of flooding and cost–benefit analyses in Taipei. It also develops Taipei resilience policies to address the vulnerabilities. In the future, rather than strengthening and rebuilding costly structures, Taipei should focus on land-use and environmental planning for resilience. Urban policies should include environmentally responsible development in the face of continued population and economic growth, and being resilient regarding natural disasters. Most important is the need for a strong political commitment and leadership to initiate and implement urban policies toward resilience.

This paper aims to review and develop lessons learned from the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction Local Government Self Assessment Tool (LGSAT) experience in four cities. The capacity to understand, learn from and respond to or reorganize in the face of change is at the core of urban resilience to disasters, climate change and major shocks. Self assessments, like the LGSAT, can be used to engage city stakeholders in critically assessing and understanding their capacity according to a set of standards of resilience.

City stakeholders in four cities, Hat Yai and Udon Thani, Thailand and Hue and Lao Cai, Vietnam, completed the LGSAT in an open multi-stakeholder process as part of urban climate resilience programs.

Completing the LGSAT provided important and valuable information about institutional capacity that is important for disaster risk reduction and climate change efforts. Multi-stakeholder processes allowed for greater and more sustained dialogue among groups that may not have a chance to interact regularly and helped build trust and relationships that contribute to climate resilience and disaster risk reduction efforts.

Further, the inclusion of multiple viewpoints allowed for more nuanced and novel consideration of issues and in multiple cities led to new projects that focused on building institutional and agent capacity. The LGSAT process relied on facilitation that was able to guide discussion, ensure safe spaces for dialogue and address stakeholder questions. Finally, while the tool was applied to questions of climate change in this process, there is still room to improve the tool to more adequately and directly address issues of climate change risk.

This paper aims to fill a conceptual gap in the understanding of rapidly changing characteristics of local risk, addressing how the notion of the local might be reframed, and how opportunities for multi-scale interventions for disaster risk reduction might be identified.

The paper illustrates the significance of the systems and services on which urbanization depends – water, food, energy, transport and communications – to consider the cascading impacts at multiple scales often beyond the administrative boundaries of cities, and how vulnerabilities and risks are distributed unevenly across different groups of people.

The process of rapid urbanization in the Mekong Region represents a fundamental transformation of ecological landscapes, resource flows, livelihoods and demographics. In addition to the location of urbanization, it is these transformative processes and the critical dependence on inter-linked systems that shape the overall picture of urban disaster and climate vulnerability.

By drawing on research and practical experience in two of the most rapidly urbanizing countries in the world, Thailand and Vietnam, the approach and findings have implications for understanding global patterns of urbanization.

The paper contributes to considering practical actions whether in terms of policy or project implementation for both the assessment of disaster and climate risk, and for actions to reduce vulnerability and promote resilience.

The paper draws largely from social science perspectives, highlighting the dynamism of social organization in urbanizing contexts, and the implications for risk and vulnerability.

The paper draws on original research in Thailand and Vietnam that takes urbanization as the starting point for assessing vulnerability and risk.

This study aims to examine the trajectory of the urban growth of Borneo by portraying its resilient settlements in the pre-colonial times, tropical sensitive colonial architecture, the built environment of the post–independence period and finally the contemporary city image. This is followed by a comparative study of its major urban centres and determining how globalisation and neoliberalism impact the traditional urban settlements of this island and poses a threat to its rich biodiversity.

This study uses case study research methodology involving selected cities on the Island of Borneo including Kota Kinabalu, Sandakan, Miri and Kuching (Sabah and Sarawak, Malaysia), Bandar Seri Begawan (Brunei), and major cities of the state of Kalimantan, Indonesia. Data collection includes a literature review, content analysis, field assessment and observations. The major research objectives would address past and current issues in the selected urban environment of Borneo. They address the historical evolution of major cities of Borneo, current urban development trends, the deterioration of the traditional urban fabric as a result of post–independence development and later globalisation.

This study found that the rich cultural tradition and climate-responsive architecture from the past have been discontinued to pave way for fast track and often speculative development. The results contribute in the convergence of existing shortcomings of cities from three nations on Borneo Island in guiding future sustainable urban planning agenda for achieving a resilient city status while reinstating the character and the sense of place. The study expects the recommendations to become prerequisites for future urban planning in sensitive tropical regions.

This research identified a new “Borneo approach” to urban development. The study strongly recommends top priorities for the central, state and local governments of Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia allowing the planners and decision-makers to establish a new tropical urban planning initiative with the ample design practice for this unique region in Southeast Asia. The results of this study can serve as the guiding principles for other urban environments in fragile and sensitive tropical regions.

Urban resilience is a fairly new but rapidly emerging area of interest. Academia as well as the professional and practitioner communities are increasingly engaged in understanding the characteristics of resilience in complex urban issues. The year 2007–2008 was a historical milestone in human history for two reasons. First, the percentage of urban population to total population in the world touched 50 percent; second, the works of climate scientists were recognized as being so significant that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007. Both events are closely associated with and provide special impetus to further research into and understanding of urban resilience, which this chapter discusses further in the following sections.

The purpose of this paper is to bring a new perspective on the meaning of resilience in Indonesia’s main urban settlement type, known as kampung. The paper reviews kampung in major urban centres in Indonesia, but focuses on a case study of Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city. Despite effectively accommodating the majority of Surabaya’s population, kampung inhabitants are stigmatised and kampung are viewed as slum-like habitats. Such a pejorative view neglects to consider the importance of kampung and ignores their inherent and potential resilience. It is important to study both the risks and resilience of kampung so that they can be developed to address social, economic and environmental vulnerabilities in Southeast Asian cities.

A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify the risks and resilience of kampung. Key themes were mapped from the literature and used to construct a framework for understanding and enhancing resilience within this distinctive vernacular settlement type. In addition, a place-based approach constructed from remote sensing and field studies provide a deeper understanding of the structure of this urban settlement type.

Kampung play an important role in housing the majority of Surabaya’s population and are an intrinsic part of the city’s urban structure. The characteristics and conditions of kampung vary throughout Indonesia. Surabaya has a variety of kampung types which demonstrates distinctive forms of both risk and resilience. This research finds that there are many positive dimensions of kampung and that this vital form of settlement is well suited to support the growth and sustainability of Southeast Asia’s emerging megacities.

This paper evaluates the current state of knowledge on risk and resilience of kampung within Surabaya. To gain a clearer understanding of why kampung are resilient, long-term field work and deeper analysis of kampung, in particular the social and physical structures, are needed.

Planning for high-density urban development needs to integrate kampung as a part of existing and new urban settlements to accommodate diverse populations.

This paper demonstrates that knowledge on kampung resilience is relevant to the adaptation of existing urban settlements and the future development of new urban settlements. This paper contributes a clearer understanding of why kampung in Surabaya are not slums and establishes a framework that supports the development of kampung as a resilient and functional settlement type in current and future urban developments. Considering the large and rapidly growing populations who depend on kampung in the Southeast Asian region, this research is of considerable significance.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role and challenges for Sri Lankan local governments in creating a disaster resilient built environment within urban Sri Lankan cities.

The paper is based on a literature review and a case study conducted in the Batticaloa city of Sri Lanka, supported by expert interviews among local and other government officials, policy makers, practitioners and academics who are engaged in disaster management and urban planning within the country.

The literature and empirical data reveal that local governments are facing a number of challenges in contributing to making cities resilient to disasters. Some of the issues that have emerged are inadequate financial and human resource capabilities; a lack of knowledge of disaster risks and vulnerabilities; the need for long‐term political commitment; a lack of focus on pre‐disaster planning; inadequate legislative authority; a lack of clear cut responsibilities and coordination among agencies; and a lack of involvement in major development activities, physical planning and regulation of land use. It is important to address these challenges faced by local governments in creating a disaster resilient built environment in a holistic manner to ensure effective disaster risk reduction within cities.

The paper is based on partial findings of research which aims to explore and propose mechanisms to empower the Sri Lankan local governments to make cities more resilient to disasters, within the context of the built environment.

The paper identifies the weaknesses of the current institutional arrangements in place for creating a disaster resilient built environment in Sri Lanka and highlights the challenges faced by a local government in creating a disaster resilient built environment within a Sri Lankan city.

In this chapter the objective is to link the causes (risks) with the need of disaster resilient entities (urban areas) in an era in which the climate is changing and natural hazards are likely to occur more frequently and more severely (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007). The previous chapters defined what a resilient city is and how it can be understood, but another question may arise subsequently: how to measure a disaster resilient city? This is what this chapter is about: to develop a tool that is capable of adequately addressing the vulnerable parts of a city's functional system, and additionally, its responsive capacity to cope with a potential disaster. This tool – named Climate Disaster Resilience Index, which is only the process of measurement, or Climate Disaster Resilience Initiative (CDRI), which encompasses all aspects of this approach – shall demonstrate how different functionalities of a city can be assessed in a comprehensive single attempt. Accordingly, the CDRI is more than just a tool to measure the condition of a city at a certain point of time; it also has the wider ambition to lead communities and local governments onto a path of sustainable development that ought to increase the overall resilience level of their city to climate-related disasters. As a result, the CDRI tool shall serve as an urban planning tool depicting the sectors within an urban context that are more or less resilient.

Safe-to-fail (SF) is an emerging resilient design approach that has the potential to minimize the severity of flood damages. The purpose of this study is to explore the SF design strategies to reduce flood disaster damages in US coastal cities. Therefore, this study addresses two research questions: identifying the most suitable SF criteria and flood solution alternatives for coastal cities from industry professionals’ perspective; and investigating the controlling factors that influence the AEC students’ interest to learn about SF concepts through the curricula.

This study used the analytical hierarchy process to evaluate the SF criteria and flood solutions where data were collected through surveying 29 Department of Transportation professionals from different states. In addition, the study adopted a quantitative methodology by surveying 55 versed participants who reside in a coastal area and have coastal flood experiences. The data analysis included ordinal probit regression and descriptive analysis.

The results suggest that robustness is the highest weighted criterion for implementing SF design in coastal cities. The results demonstrated that ecosystem restoration is the highest-ranked SF flood solution followed by green infrastructure. Moreover, the results highlighted that age, duration spent in the program and prior knowledge of SF are significantly related to AEC students’ interest to learn this concept.

SF design anticipates failures while designing infrastructures thus minimizing failure consequences due to flood disasters. The findings can facilitate the implementation of the SF design concept during the construction of new infrastructures in coastal cities as well as educate the future workforces to contribute to developing resilient built environments.