Abstract

In a context of climate change, increased urban flooding and increased uncertainty, urban managers are forced to innovate to design appropriate risk management strategies. Among these strategies, making cities resilient has become an imperative. The concept of resilience is a multidisciplinary concept that defines the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance and then recover its functions. This concept refers to technical, urban, social, architectural, architectural, economic and political innovation and calls into question traditional risk management systems. This injunction to innovation is perfectly adapted to the urban, economic, political, social and ecological complexity of the contemporary world. As a result, the concept of resilience is integrated with urban sprawl issues and associated risks. However, despite this theoretical and conceptual adequacy, resilience remains complex to integrate into the practices of urban planners and territorial actors. Its multitude of definitions and approaches have contributed to its abstraction and lack of operationalization.
In response to this observation, this research aims to address these operational gaps by building a spatial decision support system to clarify and promote the integration of the concept into urban practices. The idea behind this approach is that urban resilience embodies the abilities and capacities of a city and its population to develop before, during and after a disruptive event in order to limit its negative impacts. This scientific positioning therefore makes it possible to analyze urban resilience as a continuum, highlighting proactive capacities that the urban system must develop in order to (re)act in the face of flooding. This work was based on a socio-economic partnership with the City of Avignon and its GIS Service (Geographic Information System). The approach made it possible to build three measurement indicators to address the urban, technical and social resilience of the Avignon area. These indicators have made it possible to acquire information on the variables defining potential resilience that would foster the emergence of an adequate response to a natural disaster and more precisely to an urban flood. The use of geovisualization techniques has made it possible to visualize treatments and results in order to explain the approach to urban managers. At the same time, consultation workshops were held to present and discuss the results obtained through the indicators with critical infrastructure managers and managers.
The co-construction of these indicators, in order to build an analysis and knowledge around urban resilience, followed by the implementation of workshops with stakeholders in the territory, in order to promote the territorial decision-making process, has made it possible to develop a culture of resilience. This spatial decision support system has therefore made it possible to pool theoretical and practical knowledge on urban risk and resilience issues in order to reach the consensus necessary for decision-making and the operationalization of resilience.

Key words: Resilience, urban floods, spatial decision support system, collaborative approach, risk management, climate change