This special issue contributes to the study of urban resilience to disasters. It showcases a variety of innovative methodological approaches that collectively demonstrate how the notion of resilience can be put on solid empirical footing. Collectively, they illustrate the use of a wide-ranging toolbox of technologies that includes geo-simulation, remote sensing, GIS and numerical computation. The modeling approaches range from structural modeling through statistical estimation, agent based modeling and facility location modeling through to social media analytics and data mining. Together the set of papers presents a coherent set of state-of-the-art contributions to an important topic short on systematic and well-grounded methods. It is likely to appeal to a variety of professional and academic communities concerned with urban planning and engineering, disaster management and mitigation.
Most of the contributions to this special issue emanate from a scientific workshop on the topic of Modeling Urban Resilience held in Jerusalem in February 2017. The workshop was conducted within the framework of dim2sea - a collaborative effort involving research groups from the Department of Geography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and IRIDeS, the International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University. The project is  funded by the Israeli Ministry of Science, Technology and Space and the Japan Science and Technology Agency under the Japan-Israel Bilateral Research Fund.

See SI: Modeling Urban Resilience to Disasters under Publications.