Eleonora Cutrini (p), Federico Ninivaggi

Anabela Ribeiro

The link between redundancy and resilience has been discussed in various disciplines, with ecosystem resilience related to the trade-offs between efficiency and redundancy. Scholars found that ecological networks maintain a unique balance between pathway redundancy and efficiency that allows them to be productive under normal circumstances as well as survive disruptions (Ulanowicz et al., 2009 among others).

Starting with the engineering conception of redundancy as an indicator of the reliability of networks and systems (Downer, 2009, Perrow, 1999), we aim to provide a comprehensive view of the links between redundancy, resilience, and efficiency. Since real-life complex human systems are highly interconnected, improving resilience usually implies increased sunk costs. We propose a simple economic framework based on a trade-off between redundancy and efficiency that also relates to the notion of vulnerability. We discuss how the proposed model can be easily adapted to different purposes and applications such as supply networks, strategic business decisions, and public welfare systems up to the design of choices in behavioural economics.

Alexandru Banica (p), Peter Nijkamp, Karima Kourtit

Eleonora Cutrini

Over the past years, the Blessing in Disguise (BiD) hypothesis has been a focal point of applied and quantitative research in disaster resilience studies, both on a case study basis and on a global comparative basis. This hypothesis suggests that actual natural or manmade perturbations or shocks (e.g., extreme events that can transform into disasters) may induce active responses in communities or society if catastrophes heavily affect them. Such a highly responsive attitude and related action-oriented policy may, in the long run – under favourable conditions to be identified - generate new and sometimes unexpected innovation benefits for the economy that would not have been realised without such disasters. In the spirit of the BiD hypothesis, a new challenging research question has emerged, namely whether societies or regions prone to risks or threats are able to develop pro-actively a range of preventive strategies and actions, including the necessary public investments, that would also generate long-run high revenues for the economy, even in the absence or non-occurrence of such disasters (the ‘no-regret principle’). This variant of the BiD hypothesis is also increasingly addressed and investigated, with a major emphasis on the economic, technological, physical-geographic or institutional support conditions. Both versions of the BiD hypothesis have enjoyed much interest in the recent past and will likely attract much attention in the future, certainly in light of recent geo-political conflicts, climate change, and natural catastrophes. This research will be supported by worldwide open-access disaster databases, which can be encapsulated by digital data analytics, complex modelling experiments, spatial cluster analysis and advanced geoscience techniques. These new advances have led to a wide array of quantitative, statistical and econometric modelling studies, which have also generated important policy guidelines, both as ‘late warning’ lessons and ‘early warning’ messages. It turns out that institutional quality, solidity of public agents, flexibility in prevention policy and political morality are key factors. The above propositions are tested by employing a new complex data approach inspired by Complex Network Analysis, as inter alia developed by Barabasi. This methodology will be applied to a range of global databases, both at the level of disaster incidents/events and at the level of disaster threats in risk-prone areas worldwide. The main emphasis of the study will be on identifying distinct and characteristic clusters of areas (‘clubs’) whose outcomes support (or contradict) the BiD hypothesis to unveil their critical success factors.

Elena Calegari (p), Antonella Rita Ferrara, Marzia Freo, Aura Reggiani

Alexandru Banica

We investigate the role of the main regional policy of the European Union, the EU Cohesion Policy (CP), in countering the economic and financial crises that hit the EU in 2008 and 2011, enhancing regional resilience interpreted in terms of well-being. Using counterfactual distributions, the impact of CP on the dynamics of well-being and its dimensions (economic performance, education level, and health conditions) is estimated. Moreover, to explore the adaptive resilience of EU regions, we account for spatial spill-over effects across regions by using the spatial extension of the Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973) decomposition. This way, we are able to disentangle the nuanced impact of regional characteristics on well-being dynamics during and after the crisis, highlighting variations in the extent to which EU regions recover from recessionary shocks. Our study contributes not only to the understanding of the direct impact of the EU Cohesion Policy on regional well-being but also sheds light on the intricate spatial dynamics that shape the resilience and recovery patterns across European regions during times of economic upheaval.

Anabela Ribeiro (p), Mehrnaz Zargarzadeh, Marta García, José Cáceres-Merino

Elena Calegari

Developing inclusive, sustainable, and resilient urban areas, as part of the United Nations (UN) initiatives, aims to address a variety of environmental, social, and economic challenges, such as air and noise pollution, traffic congestion, and inequities in access to facilities (United Nations, 2017). In this context, urban resilience is being implemented as a transformative strategy to improve cities' ability to respond and adapt to these challenges (Kochskämper et al., 2024).
The urban agenda addresses urban mobility as one of the main dimensions of urban resilience (European Commission, 2020). This is also a significant concern after the COVID-19 pandemic, aiming to create comprehensive approaches and techniques to evaluate the resilience of transport modes (Martins et al., 2019). The pandemic impacted urban mobility, namely in travel patterns (Kakderi et al., 2021) rather than individual travel preferences (De Palma et al., 2022). These changes resulted in modal shift, impacting traffic congestion and air pollution (Thombre & Agarwal, 2021). Some cities adapted deeper and faster, showing how urban resilience is not widely implemented. Thus, planning urban resilience becomes a vital objective on the urban agenda, adding to the previously mentioned challenges (Datola, 2023). Although some research highlighted the importance of resilience in the context of urban planning and urban mobility (Amirzadeh et al., 2023; Sharifi, 2019; Zeng et al., 2022), Martins et al. (2019) stressed that there is a lack of literature addressing urban mobility resilience measurement straightforwardly. This lack of literature is critical for small and mid-sized, car-dependent cities, that act as regional nodes and territorial cohesion enhancers.
The objective of this study is to assess the urban mobility resilience of two inner Iberian medium-sized cities, Coimbra (Portugal) and Cáceres‎ (Spain). The assessment considers urban environments that promote inclusivity, characterised by pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly public spaces (Liu & Liu, 2023), green spaces (Huma et al., 2021), accessibility to facilities and services (Logan & Guikema, 2020) and convenient access to public transport (Azolin et al., 2020). This study employs a comprehensive approach that integrates quantitative and qualitative analysis, considering GIS urban indicators (proximity to destination, urban green space (UGS), connectivity, and accessibility to collective transportation) and decision support methods (like AHP) to rank the factors that can assist city planners in identifying solutions to create resilient urban strategies.