A SNA-based methodology for measuring the community resilience from the perspective of social capitals: Take Nanjing, China as an example

Abstract

Facing increasingly frequent disasters, the resilience concept are widely adopted to make up the limitations of traditional community disaster management. The relationships among community stakeholders along with their responsibilities and actions are important social capitals coping with community disaster, which have a significant impact on forming the community resilience. Accordingly, this paper is the first attempt to measure the community resilience using social network analysis (SNA) method from the view of social capitals of stakeholders. Firstly, six key disaster-adapting social capitals in the urban community are identified using systematic literature review (SLR). Then, the social capitals before, during and after the community disaster are calculated based on the SNA to characterize the level of community resilience. Finally, taking a waterlogging disaster in Nanjing city of China, some implements on enhancing the community resilience in different phases are proposed from four aspects: rapidity, robustness, redundancy and resourcefulness. The findings in the case study and the conclusions of this paper provides an easy method to calculate the resilience and social capitals of a community at different stages of a disaster, and also helps to improve disaster prevention and reduction efforts in urban communities, especially those that are collaboratively managed by multi-stakeholders.