From Disasters to Measurements: Experience-Derived Urban Resilience Indicators from Selected Cases in the Global South

Urban resilience indicator frameworks are conventionally built from the top down. A conceptual model of resilience is specified, divided into dimensions, and populated with indicators chosen through expert judgment. Empirical evidence often enters to validate a structure already fixed. This paper reverses that sequence and derives indicators from conditions documented as shaping outcomes in real disaster events. Two evidence bases are used. A systematic review of 270 peer-reviewed empirical studies of flooding, earthquakes, wildfires, volcanic eruptions and heatwaves, published between 2000 and 2025, yields 24 recurrent determinants and 19 common core indicators applicable across hazards. Twenty-five documented cases from the Global South provide evidence of physical conditions not captured in the reviewed studies, yielding 61 hazard-specific indicators and 80 indicators in total. The derived set converges with established frameworks where administrative and spatial data already exist and diverges systematically elsewhere. The divergent indicators share one property: none can be populated from records municipalities already hold. Failures in the documented cases concerned implementation rather than a lack of knowledge, and in nineteen of the twenty-five events the mechanism connecting hazard to harm ran through informality, chiefly unpermitted construction and unrecognized informal settlements.