Five cities: Application of the Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy to characterize resilience across locations

Urban science questions are often difficult to answer due to the complexity of cities and the processes that shape and sustain them. Past work responded to this by proposing the Urban Systems Abstraction Hierarchy (USAH) as a tool which overcomes four complexity obstacles and operationalises resilience concepts. For the first time, this paper applies the USAH approach to five UK cities to demonstrate how it can be technically applied and theoretically interpreted to determine differences related to resilience. Results show that the USAH is capable of reflecting differences between UK cities based on varying physical resources and how these translate to differences in more abstract functions and outcomes. We hope this approach will be taken forward and applied by others to operationalise resilience concepts in a wider range of locations and contexts (for example, climate hazards as well as futures scenarios), and inform place-based resilience planning.