Urban vulnerability assessment: Advances from the strategic planning outlook

Abstract

[EN] Urban strategic planning and urban vulnerability assessment have increasingly become important issues in both policy agenda and academia. However, a comprehensive review of the advances made in urban vulnerability, emphasizing their shared aspects, has yet to be performed. The aiming of this paper is to addresses the latter by conducting an evaluation on assessment methods disclosed in this decade. Once their common evolutive pathway is traced, the review follows an analytical framework, based on the above, evaluating the research requirements from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view. Our findings indicate that the robustness, cognitive and participatory research lines are those in which most advancement has been made, while those of urban dynamics and multi-scale progressed the least. Our analysis also demonstrates that methods integrating more lines of research, as well as the employment of comprehensive approaches, promotes advancing the developmental stage. We conclude that the focusing of research lines should be shifted, in order to bridge the qualitative gap identified without demanding an improbable, quantitative increase.