Facilitating optimal people-centered risk-informed infrastructure design in growing cities, through a holistic lens

Abstract

Past events around the world have highlighted the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to natural and anthropogenic hazards, which result in disruptions that have significant societal consequences. Many previous studies have focused on developing risk-modeling approaches and computational tools for quantifying the consequences of hazard events on critical infrastructure in urban environments. However, in the context of climate change, rapid population growth, and increasingly interconnected urbanization, there is a need for a novel theoretical framework that designs risk-informed critical infrastructure from a forward-looking, dynamic, and people-centered perspective. Furthermore, optimizing critical infrastructure design in terms of natural-hazard risk could have additional socioeconomic consequences (e.g., gentrification) that are not considered in conventional natural-hazard risk-modeling approaches. This paper addresses these two limitations of the state-of-the-art, proposing an innovative people-centered, risk-informed decision-making framework for urban infrastructure development. The proposed framework captures the (uncertain) performance of infrastructure in terms of serving the communityﾒs needs at different pre- and post-hazard temporal instances. In addition, it integrates a bespoke agent-based model that accounts for the implications of variations in infrastructure development on land values and resulting dynamic residential location decision making, measuring macro-scale effects that are not explicitly related to natural-hazard events like gentrification and segregation. We demonstrate the proposed framework by optimizing the transportation infrastructure design of a hypothetical expanding community of the Global South, balancing competing implications in terms of flood risk and the eviction of predominantly marginalized low-income individuals from their homes due to rising prices. The holistic approach to decision making facilitated by this work can be used to guide inclusive risk-sensitive future infrastructure planning in tomorrowﾒs cities.