An Examination of Urban Infrastructure System Interdependence to Enable Secondary Impact Analyses

Given the interconnected behavior of modern urban infrastructure, cities must now reconcile with the many secondary impacts that changes to an individual infrastructure system will impose on the multiple adjacent systems. Through a comprehensive analysis of urban infrastructure, this research aims to elucidate the functional elements shared between individual infrastructure systems to enable secondary impact assessments. To begin, city-level measures are correlated to establish a basic representation of urban behavior. Moving to the system level, functional analyses of individual systems uncover shared resources and functions as well as KPPs and risk drivers. City-level interdependencies are then elicited and utilized to identify potential resource and functional synergies. Lastly, a framework is suggested to incorporate the systems approach taken into the traditional urban planning process. Overall, the research offers insight into the interdependent behavior of modern infrastructure and promotes the adoption of secondary impact analysis in comprehensive city planning.