Resilience engineering emerged in the early 2000s as a complementary approach to the conventional wisdom of safety management which is largely centered on the notion of robustness, or resistance to failure. Resilience has its roots in the recognition that focusing only on increasingly robust, or fail-safe, engineering design based on some acceptable level of risk leads to a false sense of safety. 

In this seminar, several examples will be shown to demonstrate the universal scaling of urban engineered infrastructure networks when both the topology and function of these networks are considered. Generalizable principles for the failure of urban networks will be discussed with examples from road networks, water networks and human mobility datasets from disasters. Based on these observations, insights for developing novel models of recovery of complex networks will be presented. Using these examples, new ways of studying city networks with people at the center of all city planning/design will be presented.