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Community resilience and critical urban infrastructure: Where adaptive capacities meet vulnerabilities

Brazil's capital Brasília is located in the heart of the Cerrado

The cases suggest that to bring about greater community resilience, and thus ensure security and sustainable development, governments must vigorously upgrade critical infrastructure not just to improve efficiency, but also to achieve equity among urban communities.

Introduction

Critical infrastructure refers to the structures, facilities, supplies and technological systems needed for development, such as roads, telecommunication networks, piped water and drainage systems, and electricity grids. While the role of critical infrastructure in ensuring development and security is well-recognised by stakeholders, the actual building and provision of such infrastructure, especially in developing countries, has often proceeded in an uneven manner.

In many cities in developing countries, critical infrastructure development is concentrated in affluent areas. Meanwhile, the poor often lack access to basic amenities, and are forced to resort to alternatives that may be unsafe and perhaps more expensive as well. Such solutions have negative repercussions, discussed in greater detail later in this paper, that could affect not just the long-term resilience of urban poor communities, but also that of the city overall. This NTS Insight thus argues that, while governments must vigorously upgrade critical infrastructure, they need go beyond emphasising revenue generation (through privatisation of public utilities and services) and efficiency gains, and also pay attention to achieving equity among urban communities.

This NTS Insight begins by examining the conceptual links between critical infrastructure and community resilience. The connections are then illustrated using the cases of three of Southeast Asia’s cities – Jakarta, Manila and Ho Chi Minh City. This paper specifically focuses on these cities’ water infrastructure, that is, their facilities for supply of water, wastewater treatment and drainage; and the vulnerabilities that arise from turning to alternative, off-grid sources of water. It then turns to the challenges that governments have faced in providing better water infrastructure; and examines the extent to which existing bottom-up initiatives are able to overcome these challenges.

Critical infrastructure is conventionally defined in terms of physical structures and systems. ASEAN, for instance, defines it as 'the primary physical structures, technical facilities and systems which are socially, economically or operationally essential to the functioning of a society or community, both in routine circumstances and in the extreme circumstances of an emergency’.

However, it has become clear that conceptualising critical infrastructure in such terms has its limitations. For instance, in times of disaster, adaptation or resilience strategies that are based on recovery of physical infrastructure (such as water and transportation systems) may miss the mark when it comes to addressing the needs and concerns of vulnerable communities.2 Poor communities may need the support of social infrastructure such as health services, insurance and compensation for the loss of sources of livelihoods to help them recover. In recent decades, the concept of critical infrastructure has evolved to include soft capital or social infrastructure in the form of human resources and knowledge on community capacity. There are also moves to develop 'smart cities’, where physical infrastructure is complemented by intellectual and social capital through information sharing and collaboration.

The robustness of a city’s critical infrastructure may influence a community’s 'resilience’, that is, its ability to bounce back after an emergency or disaster. Within the context of this NTS Insight, resilience is also understood as a community’s ability to learn and adapt to adverse conditions brought about by environmental change amid poor access to critical infrastructure. To better understand the connections between critical infrastructure and community resilience, it would be useful to view community resilience as a network of various adaptive capacities across different areas – economic development, social capital, information and communication, and community competence (see table 1). The value of this framework is that it supports a broader conceptualisation of community resilience and critical infrastructure, including the notion that resilience varies in terms of social capital and depends on a 'combination of effective urban governments and well-organised community groups and structures’.

For the complete article, please see RSIS Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies.