Concepción lies in Central Chile, 500 kilometres south of the capital, Santiago. The city sits within the larger urban area of Greater Concepcion, where a population of 1,026,425 reside across 10 municipalities. As the 11th largest municipality in Chile, Concepción is home to 231,233 people. Located 10 kilometres upstream of the mouth of the river Biobio, the city is also a capital, major port, and important administrative hub for the wider Bio-Bio region.
Concepción was among the areas most severely impacted by the 2010 Chile earthquake. The 8.8 magnitude quake was followed by a devastating tsunami, which affected over 500 kilometres of the Chilean coast.
Following these events the Municipalidad de Concepción, along with civil society and National Government, expressed a strong interest in measuring city resilience. With support from the Rockefeller Foundation, Arup is undertaking a series of pilot research studies in five global cities to test the feasibility, suitability and effectiveness of the City Resilience Index (CRI). Concepción was selected as an example of a Global South city that has undergone wide scale reconstruction and transformation following a major natural disaster. The CRI pilot offered the city the opportunity to evaluate strengths and weaknesses across the range of systems and processes which shape its resilience profile.
