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Faced with increasing urbanization and uncertainties linked to climate change, the scientific community has integrated the concept of resilience into urban management practices. Once revolutionary, now a buzzword, resilience is a concept that is difficult to transform into an integrated tool that stakeholders accept and adopt. This paper offers a perspective on the different interpretations of resilience, its difficult implementation and the tools that seek to operationalize it. The underlying questions are how these tools are appropriated by urban managers and territorial decision-makers, and how the theoretical concept can be translated into resilient urban development. This research paper reviews the work on resilience and investigates its use and operationalization, comparing two different approaches – organizational (Canada) and holistic (France) – that aim to clarify and operationalize resilience. These theoretical approaches have been combined to create workshops for urban managers so they can move from theoretical results to practical applications.

Managing interdependencies among critical infrastructures (CIs) represents a constant challenge for local authorities. When assessing a community’s resilience, this challenge takes on all its importance. Civil security authorities are responsible for taking on this challenge and ensuring continuity in the assessment of resilience. The work of the Centre risque & performance (CRP) in Montreal has identified the core element to support the authorities. The space of resilience that authorities need to create to better manage interdependencies among CIs allows them to directly analyze the resilience of CIs in their territory. The DOMINO tool developed by the CRP supports the authorities in portraying CIs and their dependence, analyze resilience as a temporal and geographical simulation of failure and, ultimately, maintain the space of resilience that ensures collaboration sustainability and integrate them into high-performance system.

Avoir la resilience comme objectif a atteindre est salutaire, reste encore pour le responsable d’une organisation a implementer cet objectif au quotidien. La premiere de ses tâches est d’evaluer le potentiel de resilience de son organisation fonde sur l’appreciation de la marge de manœuvre dont il jouit pour prendre des decisions en interne. C’est la these defendue par Benoit Robert [1] , Matthieu Marty [2] , Yannick Hemond [3] et Andree de Serres [4] dans cet article. La determination de cette marge de manœuvre est un prealable a la definition du potentiel de resilience fonde sur trois criteres : la capacite de l’organisation (et de ses gestionnaires) a accepter des perturbations, a planifier des mesures de protection, a anticiper ces perturbations pour assurer une mise en œuvre rapide des mesures de protection. Enfin, ces trois composantes doivent etre pensees a partir du portrait de l’organisation, celui du systeme et de ses vulnerabilites. Les auteurs affirment en effet que l’entreprise doit avant tout se connaitre.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a coherence analysis to evaluate the resilience for a critical infrastructure (CI). This is the new way to evaluate the CI and demonstrate that the authors need to pass from the protection towards resilience. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use two approaches for this research. First is a consequence-based approach to evaluate the resilience. This approach has been used many times for evaluating the interdependencies between CIs. The second is a systemic approach to characterize the system and doing the coherence analysis. Findings – This paper presents a methodology to evaluate the coherence in a context of CIs protection. The coherence analysis in resilience is a new concept and the first result to the application seems very good for the user of the research. Originality/value – The originality of this paper is the coherence analysis applied to a resilience evaluation. The criteria for coherence analysis is innovative and it is a new way to consider the resilience and the relation between an organization and it is partners. Another value is the need for a wider scope in the analysis of hazards and how to address them that includes the infrastructure system itself, but also other related organizations and infrastructure systems.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show the evolution of the concept “state of preparedness” into “state of resilience” in the context of emergency management, and the implications raised by this new concept.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a literature review (scientific and governmental) of the most important articles in the field of state of preparedness evaluation.FindingsThis article presents two trends in the state of preparedness evaluation: response capability and preparation management. These two trends contribute to the evolution of the concept “state of preparedness” into “state of resilience”, a state that is defined as the ability of a system to maintain or restore an acceptable level of functioning despite disruptions and failures.Originality/valueThis literature review helps define the concept of “state of preparedness” (in terms of both management and response capability) as the new trend of resilience.

The research results presented aim to define a framework for evaluating the potential of resilience for critical infrastructure (CI). CI are an integral part of the community and a better knowledge of their potential for resilience will help to reduce the risk of disasters and provide tools to manage them. The framework helped to define a method to evaluate the potential for resilience CI based on the concept of performance and coherence. This work has been validated and applied to existing cases and the results show that it is possible to identify actions to improve resilience and reduce disaster risks and manage them better. This has allowed, among other things, a better definition of acceptable performance for CI and understanding how disruption of a CI can affect the community (which includes other CI). The analysis of coherence can also better align the components of their system and their capacity to maintain an acceptable level of functioning despite some disruptions.

The concept of governmental resilience was introduced by the Hyogo Framework in 2005. It suggested a new approach to protecting critical infrastructures and understanding their interdependencies. In a resilience process, it becomes necessary to evaluate and measure the state of resilience; the state, in turn, will indicate the strengths and weaknesses on which the organisation can act. The methodology to evaluate the state of resilience is based on three important concepts: what to anticipate, plan, and maintain. Two intertwined elements are implied: knowledge and adaptation. Knowledge is the key for a better state of resilience and is provided by the developed methodology. Adaptation gives meaning to resilience in terms of time. In fact, an organisation must be able to adapt its internal environment to cope with the external environment which is constantly changing. In this article, we present the methodology to evaluate the state of resilience and its implication for an organisation.

Every Critical Infrastructure (CI) uses a road system for its operations, whether to receive resources or to execute support activities. The road system may fail at any time and this could have repercussions on the CI's usage. With the methodology developed by the Centre risque & performance (CRP), it is possible to characterise and model the road system as a CI. Using a consequence-based approach, this paper proposes a simplified approach of addressing dependencies with the road system while evaluating interdependencies between CIs.