Dealing with urban floods within a resilience framework regarding disaster stages

Abstract

Cities encounter various risks, and flood disasters are one of the most frequent, leading to significant economic loss. The uncertainty of external shocks makes it necessary to bring disaster processes into the assessment of urban flood resilience. However, current resilience assessment lacked the consideration of disaster stages to support urban planning. Thus, focusing on urban flood resilience, we proposed a “resistance-adaptation-recovery” assessing framework in view of the three stages of flood disasters (before, during and after), with a case study in Shenzhen City, China. The results showed that the flood resilience of Shenzhen City did not perform well because of the low resistance while the adaptation and recovery had good conditions. Nevertheless, more than half of the sub-districts belonged to the high and medium-high resilience grades. Four kinds of urban resilience zones had been identified, which showed spatial distribution of overall dispersion and local concentration. The impacts of indicator weights and specialized suggestions for each resilience zone were given correspondingly. This study proposed an urban flood resilience assessment framework, which is helpful to identify the way to promote a resilient city for urban planning.