Oliveira & Fath (2023) built the Comparative Urban Resilience Index (CURI), a composite indicator aggregating 29 city-level indicators over six dimensions (including a culture/identity dimension) for six cities in Europe, China, and the Americas, with equal dimension weights, Cobb–Douglas-type aggregation, and rank normalization against the best-performing city in the sample. They explicitly flagged as open defects that this normalization caps the benchmark at the current sample's best city, forces full re-analysis when cities are added, and can show spurious performance declines; that the equal weights, indicator set, and aggregation function need refinement; that the six identity proxies are reductionist; and that city-level data gaps (pre-2000, Latin America, Africa) and 20-year assessment intervals limit comparative analysis. This record poses the surviving open problem: construct and validate a comparative urban resilience index of the CURI type whose city rankings are demonstrably robust to (or whose sensitivity is quantified against) normalization, weighting, aggregation, and city-sample composition, with an improved operationalization of cultural identity and broader city coverage at 5–10-year assessment intervals.

Background

Urban resilience — the capacity of a city to absorb shocks such as climate extremes while reorganizing and retaining its essential functions and identity — is widely assessed with composite indicators: indices built by normalizing a set of variables to a common scale, weighting them, and aggregating them into a single score. Oliveira & Fath (2023) constructed such an index, the Comparative Urban Resilience Index (CURI), for six cities (Malmö, Vienna, Beijing, Shanghai, Baltimore, São Paulo) at two time points (2000, 2020). CURI views the city as a social-ecological system (city and environment treated as one coupled system), covers six dimensions — population, economy, governance, health, environment, and identity — with 29 indicators, weights every dimension equally (1/6), and aggregates dimensions with a Cobb–Douglas-type function, i.e. a product form ∏iDiγi\prod_{i} D_i^{\gamma_i} where each DiD_i is a dimension score and γi\gamma_i its weight; a multiplicative form in which a weakness in one dimension cannot be compensated by strengths in others. All indicators were normalized to the interval [0,1] by ranking, following the OECD/JRC Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators (OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; JRC is the European Commission's Joint Research Centre): each city's indicator value is expressed relative to the best-performing city in the current sample, so the best city receives 1 and acts as the benchmark. The identity dimension, a novel feature of CURI, uses six culture-related proxies (e.g. literacy and educational attainment, patents, cultural-landscape variables), because resilience of a social-ecological system is defined to include the persistence of the city's identity; the authors acknowledge that measuring culture and identity numerically is reductionist, echoing the wider literature on cultural indicators (Ortega-Villa & Ley-García 2018; Montalto et al. 2019). In their 'Limits and Caveats' the authors identified structural weaknesses of this construction: (i) rank normalization caps the whole set at the best current performer as if that were the best possible result, a city that is surpassed shows an apparent decline caused only by other cities' growth, and inserting new cities requires re-running the entire analysis; (ii) the equal weighting and the aggregation function are untested alternatives among many; (iii) the six identity proxies only scratch the complexity of cultural identity; and (iv) city-level data are scarce before 2000 and in Latin America and Africa, while 20-year intervals are too coarse to track resilience trajectories. A mature methodological apparatus exists for exactly this class of question: the OECD/JRC Handbook, Saisana, Saltelli & Tarantola (2005), and Paruolo, Saisana & Saltelli (2013) developed uncertainty and sensitivity analysis (Monte Carlo simulation over alternative normalization, weighting, and aggregation choices, combined with variance-based sensitivity measures) as the standard quality-assurance protocol for composite indicators, showing for many published indices that rank orderings can shift substantially under construction choices; Greco, Ishizaka, Tasiou & Torrisi (2019) review the weighting and aggregation issues. This protocol, however, has not been applied to a cross-regime comparative urban resilience index with an identity dimension, and CURI itself was published without it. The unresolved question is therefore whether a comparative urban resilience index of the CURI type can be constructed — with a normalization that does not depend on the current city sample, defensible weights and aggregation, a richer identity dimension, and denser data coverage — whose comparative conclusions survive the very methodological choices its authors flagged as arbitrary.

Problem Statement

Construct and validate a comparative urban resilience index of the CURI type — a composite indicator scoring cities across the six social-ecological dimensions of resilience including a culture/identity dimension, applicable to cities in different world regions — such that its comparative conclusions are demonstrably trustworthy. Concretely, the open problem left by Oliveira & Fath (2023) comprises jointly supporting requirements toward that single objective: (1) replace or augment rank normalization against the best-performing city in the current sample with a scheme whose scores and city rankings are invariant (or whose changes are fully quantified) when the city sample is extended, removing the sample-capping benchmark and the obligation to re-run the whole analysis when new cities are added; (2) quantify the sensitivity of city rankings and score levels to the remaining free construction choices — normalization scheme, weighting scheme (versus the current equal dimension weights), and aggregation function (versus the current Cobb–Douglas form) — using the established uncertainty/sensitivity protocol for composite indicators, and either demonstrate robustness of the resulting rankings or fully quantify the changes to the comparative statements; (3) operationalize the culture/identity dimension with richer, validated indicators than the six proxies, beyond the Europe-focused cultural-vitality indices currently available; and (4) demonstrate the index on an expanded city-level dataset — including cities in under-covered regions such as Latin America and Africa, with data extending before 2000 where feasible — at assessment intervals of 5–10 years suitable for tracking resilience trajectories. The comparative claims (rankings, trajectory directions) are robust to the construction perturbations, or their changes are fully quantified, and the identity indicators are validated against the cultural-identity construct, including the limits of their coverage.

References

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