Understanding Complexity in Urban Resilience
As our cities grow in size and numbers of people, their susceptibility to sudden change in water levels increases. Over the centuries, cities throughout the world, from New Orleans to Paris, have encountered devastating floods that have a major social and economic impact. It's essential then that research is done into what makes a resilient city - an engineering approach to preventing and mitigating damage done by natural hazards. At École des Ponts, ParisTech, one of the world's oldest engineering schools, the Chair of Hydrology for Resilient Cities was established 2010 to do this. As a collaboration between the school, Fondation de Ponts and Veolia, the chair takes advantage of the expertise of all three organisations. In collaboration with Veolia, researchers are using extensive data about the Bièvre river, a small river which has a long history of major flooding events, as a pilot site for the use polarimetric X-band radar technology inflood management. Back at the school, researchers work in the Hydrology, Meteorology and Complexity laboratory on cutting-edge methodologies and technologies that can be applied to prevent disaster, and make the cities of the future much more resilient to shock. https://hmco.enpc.fr