Flood hazard and its impact on the resilience of cities : An accessibility-based approach to amenities in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden

• In the wake of climate change and its impact on increasing the number and intensity of floods, adaptability of cities to and resistance against the flood hazard is critical to retain functionality of the cities. Vulnerability of urban infrastructure and its resilience to flooding from different points of view have been important and worth investigating for experts in different fields of science. Flood hazards as physical phenomena are influenced by form of the cities and thus the magnitude of their impacts can be intensified by urban infrastructures such as street networks and buildings (Bacchin et. al, 2011). In this paper, we aim to develop a method to assess the resilience of a river city (the city of Gothenburg in Sweden), which is prone to flood events, against such disturbances and find out how the city reacts to river floods and to what extent the city retains its accessibility to essential amenities after a flood occurs. To do so, collecting required data; we, firstly, simulate flood inundation with two different return periods (50 and 1000 years) and then the impact areas overlay on the street networks. Evaluating the resilience of the city, syntactic properties of the street networks before and after flooding are measured at different scales. Additionally, accessibility and the minimum distance of the street networks to essential amenities such as healthcare centers, schools and commercial centers, at a medium distance (3 Km) is examined. The results show that flooding influences the city configuration at global scale more than the local scale based on comparison of syntactic properties before and after flooding. However, the results of accessibility and the minimum distance show that the impact of flooding on the functionality of the city is more limited to the riparian areas and the city is not affected globally.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Accessibility

Flood inundation

GIS

Resilience

Space syntax

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