A Framework to Identify the Sustainable and Resilient Zone of Urban Infrastructure System Planning and Design

To meet the global challenge of infrastructure provision for 6 billion urban residents by 2050, it is imperative to incorporate sustainability and resilience as key attributes for infrastructure development/rehabilitation. However, there is no robust approach available to decision makers to explore whether there are tradeoffs between sustainability and resilience or they are complementary. This paper presents an approach to identify the sustainable and resilient zone of urban infrastructure development. We demonstrate the efficacy of the approach through a case study on seismic retrofit of a potable water distribution system in California. The approach along with the case study provides us with a few key insights. First, while there is an apparent trade-off between sustainability and resilience, as increasing resilience increases capital investment; they are complementary when conceived from a life-cycle perspective. Second, there indeed exists a sustainable and resilient zone of planning and design, where both sustainability and resilience can be optimized together.