But since every disaster and every community is unique, a uniform measure for defining "resilience" has been hard to come by for engineers and social scientists.
In a new study, Colorado State University civil engineer Hussam Mahmoud offers an innovative approach to defining resilience that could help communities better prepare for hazards. Integrating a community's infrastructural, social and economic features, Mahmoud's team has created a dynamic mathematical model that quantifies, in space and time, how well a community would withstand a major shakeup - regardless of whether it's a natural disaster like a flood, or a social disruption like the Arab Spring in 2011.
Mahmoud and graduate student co-author Akshat Chulahwat describe their "hazard-agnostic," finite element resilience model in the journal Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering.
Mahmoud and Chulahwat's work uses finite element analysis, based on the principle that a community - be it a town, city or suburb - responds to a disaster very much like a swinging pendulum or vibrating violin string responds to a force.
"Our mathematical formula allows you to cause disruption to a community at any location, and see what that disruption would do to the entire community," said Mahmoud, associate professor of civil engineering.
Could this approach also help with more local issues, such as this engineering project on traffic management in modern Ethiopia? Follow the link to find out.
Defining Community Resilience
Many engineers and social scientists are working to define community resilience. Mahmoud is one of them, as a member of the CSU-led NIST Center for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning. Typically, resilience is viewed as an engineering, social or economic problem, and individual communities decide which metrics matter most to them. The metrics usually fall into a series of "lifelines," like water, housing, power, health, community and transportation.
In Mahmoud and Chulahwat's approach, recovery of all lifelines is integrated to form a unified resilience metric. The metric combines engineering, social and economic features of the lifelines together, as opposed to selecting only one of them.
The approach applies these same lifelines, but simplifies resilience into three classes: social, economic and infrastructure. Using an equation from classical mechanics, the team considered mass to represent social vulnerabilities; damping to represent funds available for recovery; and stiffness to represent robustness of infrastructure
If one or more of these variables experiences a change, the rest of the system follows suit.
They verified their model using a map which divided Gotham into uptown, midtown and downtown, recording the effects of various "disasters," including a riot at Arkham Asylum, which is located near uptown Gotham.
Among their observations was that a fast recovery is not necessarily best; if a community bounces back too quickly from a disruption, it can cause instabilities.
The new hazard-agnostic model provides a framework for better defining how disruptions like the Arab Spring affect communities long term.
"Our model can help us determine what happens to your community, both spatially and temporally, if it's struck by a natural disaster, economic downturn or social disruption," Mahmoud said.
For more comics-related engineering, check out The Engineering of Captain America’s Shield.