White papers

Planning Resilient Communities

Executive Summary:  Our world is changing. Extreme events are becoming less predictable with greater consequences. Infrastructure hardening alone is proving both inadequate and unaffordable. Resilience is not about preventing change – change is inevitable – rather, it is about managing change and adapting, responding, and recovering from disruptive events. How we manage change will be defined by how we manage the risk context, using urban planning to reduce the consequence of shocks and stimulate the collective ability to respond and recover. By focusing on people and the community operations that support their lives as the essential purpose of resilience, we can focus our actions more effectively. Infrastructure is built to support a purpose. That purpose does not disappear during a shock. Therefore, we should plan and design infrastructure and services to support the continued delivery of that purpose. The net result is an holistic view of community function and how it can manage both stresses and shocks to protect livelihoods, continued prosperity and quality of life. 

For full access to this white paper, please contact us. 

Enemy At the Gates: Protecting our Cyber Fortress and our Critical Infrastructure

Executive Summary: Increasingly, our critical infrastructure is managed and controlled by computers and the information networks that connect them. Cyber terrorists and other malicious actors understand the economic and social impact that a successful attack on these systems could have. While it is imperative that we defend against such attacks, it is equally imperative that we realize how best to react to them. By using path analysis in a directed graph model of critical infrastructure, planners can model and assess the effects of a potential attack and develop resilient responses. Currently, the province of Ontario relies on this approach to manage all critical infrastructure risk.

For full access to this white paper, please contact us.