What does resilience look like halfway around the world? Urban infrastructure researchers Alysha Helmrich and Lynn Abdouni explore resilience planning in Doha, Qatar


The concept of resilience can be slippery. Is it about longevity, flexibility, adaptivity? All of the above? Resilience has different definitions across disciplines, space, and time, and researchers at IRIS are figuring out the shape that resilience takes in a new project based over 7000 miles away.

This summer, urban infrastructure researchers Alysha Helmrich and Lynn Abdouni traveled to Doha, Qatar for an extended stay to advance the Proactive Resilience Plan, or PReP. This 5-year, $4.4 million collaboration between the University of Georgia, Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Qatar University plans to create a comprehensive national resilience framework. The goal of the project is to bring together stakeholders from different critical infrastructure sectors to allow the nation of Qatar to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disturbances and disasters more effectively.

“There are five major thrusts within this project,” Helmrich explained. “Three teams are working on three different forms of critical infrastructure–physical infrastructure, manufacturing, and industrial processes.” 

These three main teams are complemented by two additional project teams, one of which deals with policy and industry collaborations. The fifth team includes four UGA College of Engineering faculty: Helmrich, Abdouni, and their colleagues Bjorn Birgisson and Sajib Saha. “Our team is in charge of the system-of-systems component,” Helmrich explained. “We’re asking, ‘how does this all come together? How do we evaluate resilience across all these different sectors?’”

The team certainly has their work cut out for them. Dr. Helmrich, an urban systems engineer, leads the resilience assessment across physical infrastructure, manufacturing teams and industrial processes. “We can identify different capabilities of resilience for each of those,” she explained, “but now, how do we measure those so that we can actually assess that resilience?” 

Helmrich aims to determine what resilience means for each of the three sectors in a quantifiable way, developing a resilience scorecard that would allow government officials to evaluate their progress across each aspect of the plan.

Dr. Abdouni, a geospatial scientist and landscape designer, will follow up by building a geospatial analysis framework that accompanies the resilience scorecard. “[Dr. Helmrich] is building the main skeleton,” she explained, “and then I’m going to articulate it geospatially.” This framework will involve putting together models to explore individual resilience problems: for example, how a freight network can prevent interruptions to deliveries during flash floods. Abdouni’s framework will use GIS data to determine how much redundancy the freight network should incorporate to keep deliveries moving. 

Abdouni and Helmrich enjoying the breeze and architectural calligraphy in a courtyard at Hamad Ben Khalifa University.

The PReP team faces an interesting challenge in trying to define and design resilience across all the different fields involved as they meet with engineers, government officials and more. “There are mechanical engineers, civil engineers, industrial engineers–we haven’t even left the engineering sphere, and there’s already a disagreement on the lexicon,” Abdouni explained. A discussion the pair came back to multiple times throughout the trip was how to handle the concept of resilience, which each discipline understood differently.

Because the UGA team has few opportunities to see their project site in person, Helmrich and Abdouni spent as much of the trip as possible getting outside to explore how the people of Doha utilize outdoor spaces and where their project may impact the cityscape. One problem? The trip was in June.

“It was around 110 degrees [F] and like 60% humidity,” Helmrich laughed. While these conditions may have made their walks more strenuous, it also gave the team added perspective on the context of the project. “Having that experience at the beginning of summer, and what they’re really experiencing there with climate change, helped frame why resilience is so important to consider.”

Their exploration led to interesting discoveries about how the region deals with extreme heat. “In a few public places, particularly parks and mall plazas, you would find cold air blowing through grill structures– they’re air conditioning the outside,” Abdouni described. “It was surreal. I couldn’t get over it.” 

Water channels and shade structures in Katara cultural village are an early form of providing outdoor cooling (pre-AC).
Place Vendôme mall plaza. In addition to vegetation and the dancing fountains water feature, cool air would exit the metal white lattices underneath seats, providing a thermally pleasing environment.

The experience clarified just how important urban heat and resilience to climate change will be in their frameworks. “There is a craving for being outside or living in the city, but it’s very hot and humid,” Adbouni explained, “and very uncomfortable, unless you have lived in Arizona, like [Helmrich], or you’re stubborn, like me.” 

The project team is hopeful that their research can be framed for public consumption and address the real concerns of the city’s community. “We don’t want this to only be a technological project,” Helmrich said. Abdouni added, “We are going there as guests, as advocates, as helpers.” The team is thinking of the project from a social and ecological perspective as well as a technological one, and problems like implementing more resilient outdoor spaces are going to involve additional questions of how to encourage people to utilize those spaces despite the heat.

As part of their plan to accomplish this goal, the team is prioritizing time with key stakeholders. During the trip, Abdouni hosted a GIS workshop for students to begin thinking about her geospatial framework as a group. “Students, I think, are going to be instrumental for this,” she said. “I try to get them as excited as possible, and generate enough momentum to build something that’s viable.’”

Dr. abdouni spent part of the trip hosting a GIS workshop for students to learn about how to build and implement project tools.

Reflecting on their trip, both professors are excited to move forward, excited by the enormity of the project. During their time working with students, experiencing the city, and the collaborative team meetings with groups like the Qatar Environment and Energy Institute (QEERI), the duo intentionally focused on building relationships. The end goal of the project is to create tools that fit the user, and the collaborative meetings the pair had were useful for clarifying what future users need so that the tools the group creates will be helpful and maintained for a long time. “We don’t want to create tools that end up sitting on a shelf,” Helmrich explained.

Now that the PReP team has had time to align their goals and next steps, the group is ready to hit the ground running. The UGA team is particularly excited to gain experience in a different context: “I think research in arid regions and desert climates is going to be very relevant now and in the near future,” Abdouni said. “Fostering relationships with stakeholders in this area is one of our key broad-scope takeaways.” 

To learn more about the Proactive Resilience Plan, click here, and join us for an upcoming talk at UGA by the team’s visiting colleague Dr. Zaher Serdar on August 23rd, 2024. Serdar will present on developing frameworks for resilience and resource security, and how this shapes risk management in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in the Middle East. 

Photos provided by Lynn Abdouni.