Experimenting with urban stressors: a network-based approach to systemic resilience through the URSA framework

Understanding how shocks cascade through interdependent urban systems is essential for designing effective resilience strategies. We introduce the Urban Resilience and Sustainability Alliance (URSA), a network-based framework that represents a city’s physical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural dimensions as a multi-domain directed network of indicators, coupled with the URSA-RSPM (Realistic Stress Propagation Model). URSA integrates structural diagnostics with an adaptive contagion algorithm to quantify network resistance through defined metrics and to simulate both passive and policy-driven recovery. Computational experiments illustrate how URSA-RSPM identifies latent vulnerabilities and evaluates “what-if” interventions. In a Vancouver case study of a hypothetical tariff shock to the Public Finance and Business Environment indicators, the model reveals rapid cross-domain cascades when no action is taken and demonstrates that timely fiscal support can contain widespread failure. By serving as a city-scale digital living lab, URSA-RSPM enables planners and policy analysts to explore multi-hazard and compound-risk scenarios in a safe, data-driven environment, supporting iterative policy design and adaptive urban governance.