International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 71 (2022) 102789 Available online 12 January 2022 2212-4209/© 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Choosing a holistic urban resilience assessment tool Heiman Dianat a, d, * , Suzanne Wilkinson b , Peter Williams c , Hamed Khatibi d a HEIMAN PTY LTD, NSW, Australia b Massey University, School of Built Environment, New Zealand c United Nations ARISE, United States and IBM Distinguished Engineer (Retired), United States d Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Auckland, New Zealand A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Urban resilience Resilient cities Resilience assessments Resilience assessment tools evaluation Complex adaptive systems ABSTRACT Those involved in making resilience strategies and planning are struggling to understand the dynamic and complexity of urban areas and should be presented with a systematic tool, both in assessment and planning, to help them make important choices about which actions, plans, and policies to implement. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure that these methods are based on sound theory and are simple and comprehensible. Proper and accurate measurement of resilience are the steppingstones in developing effective resilience plan. Recently, there has been efforts to create tools to measure resilience in urban areas. Several tools have been created, however, there is a lack of evidence-based analysis into these assessment tools. This study is going to address this gap by fnding a systemic and holistic approach to assess resilience. The aim is to determine the criteria required for assessing the resilience of the urban complex system by asking series of questions. Furthermore, existing urban resilience assessment tools evaluated to determine whether they can measure urban resilience holistically. Any method to assess resiliency in complex urban systems has to take a holistic approach. The whole urban system needs to be studied to be able to determine the overall behaviour of the system. The Auckland region was chosen to demonstrate how the study’s concepts can be applied. Following consideration of specifc resiliency criteria, 28 questions were developed evaluate the assessment tools. The Disaster Resilience Scorecard was chosen as the best measuring tool for the determined criteria to be ran within a city. 1. Introduction The world is changing and faces new challenges that come with the impact of climate change, natural disasters, population growth, and urban densifcation [1]. It is estimated that urban areas as the most populated area are prone to many challenges and losses in approximate cataclysmic events. In the past 40 years, the economic costs of disasters have gradually risen worldwide, primarily due to the growth of the built environment. This could be seen in recent disasters that had highlighted that traditional approach of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) is not effective for large, less frequent and more damaging events that trigger signifcantly big disasters [2]. Therefore, despite substantial effort to mitigate such challenges, it is hard to reduce the disaster effects while the costs to do so continue to increase [3]. One complimentary way to the traditional method of risk management (predict and prevent) is to reduce the effects of such disasters by enhancing the performance of cities, in other words; increasing their resilience that will make them withstand the effect of unpredictable stresses and shocks. To achieve this, cities need to have comprehensive resilience plan, in which all resilience * Corresponding author. HEIMAN PTY LTD, NSW, Australia. E-mail address: h.dianat@auckland.ac.nz (H. Dianat). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijdrr https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.102789 Received 20 October 2020; Received in revised form 30 November 2021; Accepted 7 January 2022