Resilience of Urban Infrastructure in Latin American Cities

Background

Resilience is a concept of positive connotation. This term was used a hundred years ago as an indicator that allowed measuring the invulnerability or invincibility of infants, as an individual entity, as part of a family, or collectively or culturally (Glantz & Johnson, 2002). Later, other works in the literature reference to resilience as the possibility of intervention, prevention and positive adaptation to recover the vulnerabilities of individuals at risk. Other works related to resilience focuses on how to correct the vulnerability of a society and its infrastructure. For example, (McLellan et al., 2012) and (Eldosouky et al., 2017) assess the risk of global warming affecting critical infrastructures. (Meyer et al., 2018) (Godschalk, 2003) and (Kao et al., 2017) analyze repeated disturbances and focus on assessing the possibility of failure of a system facing a disaster. Also, Duijnhoven et al. (2014) and Marchant & Stevens (2017) conceive resilience as the capacity for mitigation, adaptation and recovery of a social or environmental structure affected by extreme climate changes.

In developed countries, resilience is used as an instrument to measure society's risk face to an adverse phenomenon, to prevent or intercept threats before they appear.

In the United States, there are organizations such as The National Academy of Sciences NAS, and the U.S. Global Change Research Program. These organisms offer a framework to analyze extreme events caused by a climatic phenomenon. They propose a sequence of systematized steps to discover and to document climate hazards. Then, they propose viable actions to reduce risks. These steps include measuring the initial damage caused, monitoring the recovery process, and assessing the existence of irreparable permanent damage. However, it is also possible to restore the initial state and improve the conditions to face similar disturbing events in the future.