Urban Disaster Resilience Research Articles

Digital twin approach for enhancing urban resilience: A cycle between virtual space and the real world

Construction of disaster-resilient cities has attracted considerable attention. However, traditional methods of studying urban disaster resilience through experimental approaches are often constrained by various limitations, such as testing sites, costs and ethical considerations. To address these constraints, this paper proposes incorporating digital twin concepts into urban disaster resilience research. By establishing a connection between the physical realm of the city and its virtual counterpart, this approach utilizes digital simulations to overcome the limitations of experimental methods and enables dynamic deduction and control of the disaster process. This paper delves into three key aspects encompassing the acquisition of data from reality to the virtual space, disaster simulation within the virtual space, and translation of virtual insights into effective disaster prevention strategies in reality. It provides a comprehensive summary of relevant research endeavors from the authors’ research group and showcases the effectiveness and potential of the proposed techniques. These findings serve as references for pre-disaster planning, real-time emergency assessments, post-disaster rescue operations, and accident investigations for buildings and cities.

Enhancing Disaster Resilience for Sustainable Urban Development: Public–Private Partnerships in Japan

A resilient building environment is crucial for securing sustainable development in urban areas, as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goal 11 stresses. In developing countries in particular, the risk of disasters is increasing due to the poorly built environment caused by urbanization. However, building disaster resilience in vulnerable urban environments characterized by aging houses, limited public spaces, and complex land rights and tenancy issues poses a major challenge. This study aims to identify critical factors influencing effective disaster-resilient urban development by examining Japan’s experience, with a focus on approaches facilitating public–private partnerships. Driven by disasters like the 1995 Kobe Earthquake, Japan has promoted innovative strategies to improve urban resilience and mitigate disaster impacts. The Disaster Mitigation Zone Implementation Program represents a novel program designed to revitalize densely populated areas with aging wooden structures highly vulnerable to disasters. Through semi-structured interviews, a literature review, and an in-depth case study in Tokyo, this research analyzes the development and effectiveness of this targeted redevelopment approach. Findings underscore the pivotal role of policies promoting public–private collaboration, consensus-building mechanisms among stakeholders, flexibility in project formulation, and financial incentives via government subsidies. Engaging the private sector ensures project feasibility through urban development expertise, while simpler, smaller-scale projects attract greater private investment. Japan’s experience offers valuable insights into collaborative, context-sensitive strategies for enhancing urban disaster resilience through targeted redevelopment of high-risk areas.

Classification and Planning Strategies of Multidimensional Resilience Units for Urban Waterlogging: A Case Study of the Old City District in Shijiazhuang, China

The frequency of urban disasters such as waterlogging has markedly increased, highlighting the urgent need to strengthen urban disaster prevention capabilities and resilience. This research, anchored in the resilience characteristics of robustness, redundancy, resource deploy ability, and rapid response, devised a resilience clustering factor system specifically designed for older urban districts. The old city district of Shijiazhuang, China, was selected as the empirical case study area. This research employs the K-Means++ clustering method to analyze the region’s resilience units against waterlogging. Furthermore, it utilizes the method of pedigree classification to categorize the identified ten types of resilience. Secondly, these were subsequently divided into three primary categories based on a spectrum of strengths and weaknesses within each unit: dominant, mixed, and disadvantaged clustering. This categorization unveiled the unique resilience distribution patterns within the area. The findings of this study reveal a pronounced differentiation in resilience types among the units in Shijiazhuang’s old city district. This spatial analysis highlighted a significant heterogeneity, with a tendency towards cluster formation. The spatial distribution of different resilience unit types was found to be uneven, leading to the emergence of clustered, patch-like, and zonal agglomerations. Combined with the unit clustering classification and the mean clustering performance of each factor, the response unit of waterlogging control resilience planning is determined for the study area, and the strategy of resilience waterlogging control and linkage is proposed. By mapping the spectrum of rainwater resilience types across the studied area, this research broadens the scope of resilience evaluation from a traditional vertical-level assessment to a more comprehensive horizontal typological analysis, offering empirical, theoretical insights for future resilience-building endeavors in older urban districts.

Enhancing social vulnerability assessment with energy resilience: A comprehensive study of the Netherlands

A comprehensive vulnerability assessment is a scientific basis for the realization of the United Nations' sustainable development goals. Energy resilience plays a crucial role in mitigating social vulnerability due to disaster shocks. Often, energy infrastructure and services collapse after disasters. The recent Russia-Ukraine war has exacerbated Europe's energy crisis and social vulnerabilities, making it even more urgent to add energy resilience to vulnerability assessments. This paper takes the Netherlands as the study area for vulnerability assessment, constructs a new social vulnerability indicator (SVI) system supplemented with the energy element, and compares that with the traditional energy indicator system.The results indicate that: 1) The introduction of energy indicators fills the gap of traditional SVI assessment. 2) Energy indicators reveal regional and spatial differences in potential social vulnerability in the Netherlands. 3) Energy-inclusive SVI demonstrates that uneven urbanization exacerbates risks and inequalities for vulnerable groups, with potential impacts on social vulnerability. Sustainable urban development requires the search for a recognized and coordinated approach to managing vulnerability across regions. The complementarity of energy indicators offers opportunities to provide a more comprehensive assessment of spatial patterns of social vulnerability, identify potentially vulnerable areas, enhance urban disaster resilience, and achieve sustainable urban development.

Urban Flood Resilience Assessment of Zhengzhou Considering Social Equity and Human Awareness

Flooding is one of the world’s most devastating natural disasters, and the effects of global climate change further intensify its impact. In the context of flood management, urban resilience emerges as a promising perspective. While existing urban resilience assessment systems predominantly encompass economic, social, ecological, and infrastructural factors, they often neglect crucial dimensions like social equity and human awareness. We aimed to assess urban flood resilience considering social equity and human awareness. We have developed an indicator system called the 3-Dimentional Disaster Urban Flood Resilience Index System (3D-UFRIS) to address the issue. We also introduced social media data to explore the use of big data in urban flood resilience assessment. Scrapy was used to collect data and AHP-EWM was used to calculate the results. Our findings reveal a layered distribution of urban flood resilience of Zhengzhou, categorized into five levels: highest, higher, medium, lower, and lowest resilience. Notably, the highest resilience areas, covering a mere 3.06% of the total area, were primarily situated in the Jinshui district, characterized by strong economic activity, high public awareness, and a history of waterlogging incidents. Conversely, the lowest resilience areas, encompassing the largest portion at 36%, were identified in Zhongmou County, Xinzheng, and Shangjie District, marked by lower public awareness and limited medical accessibility. This study presents a pioneering approach to comprehending urban disaster resilience, offering valuable insights into mitigating flood-related risks and enhancing urban planning strategies.

Service flow changes in multilayer networks: A framework for measuring urban disaster resilience based on availability to critical facilities

Failures of roads and critical facilities under disasters can result in public service disruptions. Studies quantifying disaster resilience commonly focus on evaluating physical performance of infrastructure systems, often cannot capture their capacity that maintain available service to meet citizens’ demands. This paper proposes a flow-based framework for quantitively measuring resilience by regarding changes in service availability to critical facilities as a primary measurement outcome. Through the utilization of multilayer networks, we effectively incorporate diverse datasets pertaining to population demographics, residential areas, critical facilities, and the roadway network. This integration enables us to simulate the intricate dynamics of public service flows within dynamic urban systems, thereby evaluating resilience levels and accurately mapping the spatial distribution patterns. The methodology was validated in Shanghai by quantifying regional variations in healthcare services under pluvial flood scenarios. The research findings highlight the heterogeneous redistribution of service flows during extreme events, leading to spatial variations in resilience outcomes, irrespective of the proximity to hazard-prone areas. The spatial clustering of vulnerable communities demonstrates a close association with mobility correlation patterns, which are strongly influenced by the distribution of facilities and the connectivity of the road network. Thus, using the framework offers valuable insights into risk mitigation and planning of critical facilities in extreme situations. It enhances the understanding on how urban resilience to disaster is influenced by urban form and flow interactions, generating robust evidence for policy.

A research on urban disaster resilience assessment system for rainstorm and flood disasters: A case study of Beijing.

Under the background of global climate change, rainstorm and flood disasters have become the most serious cataclysm. Under the circumstances of an increasingly severe risk situation, it is necessary to enhance urban disaster resilience. Based on the disaster resilience process of prevention, absorption, and enhancement, and considering the safety factors such as personnel, facility, environment and management, this paper forms a dual dimension of the urban disaster resilience assessment model covering the key elements of urban disaster response and the core capacity of urban disaster recovery. Furthermore, if taking into account the characteristics of rainstorm and flood disasters, the paper screens the key indicators to build up an assessment index system of an urban rainstorm and flood disaster. The practical application was implemented in Beijing to have an assessment of the ability to recover from rainstorm and flood disasters in all districts of Beijing. And then, some pertinent suggestions for enhancing the resilience of Beijing to rainstorm and flood disasters were proposed.

Social media-based urban disaster recovery and resilience analysis of the Henan deluge.

Measuring disaster resilience from the perspective of long-term recovery ability is important for the planning and construction of urban sustainability, whereas short-term resilient recovery can better reflect a city's ability to recover quickly after a disaster occurs. This study proposes an analytical framework for urban disaster recovery and resilience based on social media data that can analyze short-term disaster recovery and assess disaster resilience from the perspectives of infrastructure and people's psychological states. We consider the downpour in Henan, China, in July 2021. The results show that (1) social media data can effectively reflect short-term disaster recovery, (2) disaster resilience can be assessed using social media data combined with rainfall and damage data, and (3) the framework can quantitatively reflect the differences in disaster recovery and resilience across regions. The findings can facilitate better decision-making in disaster emergency management for precise and effective post-disaster reconstruction and psychological intervention, and provide references for cities to improve disaster resilience.

Analysis of Flooding Patterns in River Terraces

River terraces are utilized as a space for water-friendly leisure activities in urban areas and communities. In this study, river terrace flooding was defined and selected as a maintenance risk factor for ecofriendly infrastructure. Previous studies did not propose specific measures for analyzing the pattern of river terrace flooding and restoring river terrace resilience. Therefore, this study attempted to analyze the pattern of river terrace flooding through numerical modeling of the entire Taehwagang National Garden. Based on the analysis results obtained using the InfoWorks ICM model, the higher the slope of the rising part of the water level curve, the higher the inundation range, even if the same water level conditions. Moreover, the specifications of the starting point of the inundation and the diffusion pattern were confirmed. This study contributes to strengthening urban disaster resilience, such as the planning and maintenance of various infrastructural facilities and the provision of forecast and warning manuals.

Urban Flood Resilience Assessment Based on VIKOR-GRA: A Case Study in Chongqing, China

Flooding has been considered as one of the major challenges of urban hazards resilience assessment. Improving urban flood risk resilience has become a critical issue for city management. However, urban flood assessment models on the resilience perspective are rare. Meanwhile, in the perspective of resilience, the existing studies using the TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) assessment method for disaster assessment lack consideration of evaluation scenarios located in the midpoint of positive and negative ideal solutions. To address these issues, this study establishes an urban flood disaster resilience assessment model, selects indicators according to the TOSE (Technical, Organizational, Social and Economic) framework, ranks cities through the VIKOR-GRA (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje, Grey Relational Analysis) method, and proposes measures to improve urban disaster resilience through the resilience assessment. Chongqing is taken as an example in this study to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed model, and practical management opinions are presented to improve flood resilience in these cities. Through the analysis of actual cases, it can be seen that the model has good applicability and can better reflect the actual situation. The knowledge of flood resilience assessment methods is of particular value to policy makers, researchers and industry professionals in assessing potential risks and recognizing the importance of flood prevention mechanisms.

Disaster resilience framework indicators for a city’s disaster resilience planning strategy

Determining the level of a city’s disaster resilience and developing a disaster resilience strategy is an important process towards understanding the current and potential future risk of cities. However, the process of determining and mapping the level of urban disaster resilience presents a challenge for the City of Tshwane, as it requires a consolidated and coordinated commitment and collaboration from various role players. This research study developed disaster resilience framework indicators for the City of Tshwane to determine its current disaster resilience and to contribute to its disaster resilience and sustainable development planning strategy. The research assumed a case study design using a qualitative approach to gather data through document analysis and one-on-one interviews. Ten disaster resilience framework indicators were identified as essential indicators in assisting the City of Tshwane with its endeavour to be a disaster resilient city.

Comparing public expectations with local planning efforts to mitigate coastal hazards: A case study in the city of New Orleans, USA

Climate change has posed serious risks to coastal cities around the world. Effective urban disaster management calls for the coordination between the local government and residents. We propose a comprehensive framework to study urban disaster resilience under climate change with New Orleans of Louisiana in the U.S. as the study area. Municipal hazard mitigation must be sufficient to mitigate these hazards. Residents' risk perceptions are a vital component of social vulnerability and can shape public decisions to increase disaster resiliency. Because climate change is expected to intensify, it becomes important to ensure that residents' risk perceptions are considered when developing municipal plans to maximize regional resiliency. This research aims to identify a gap in the hazard mitigation process that can be closed to better prepare the community to manage coastal hazards. To achieve this, an online survey is distributed in the New Orleans metropolitan area to determine residents' risk perceptions and expectations of the local government's action. Policy analysis is conducted to identify the priorities held by municipal planners in these issues. Although there is no gap in the perception of risk and municipal mitigation of current coastal hazards, there is a gap between the municipal approach to climate change mitigation and the concern and expectation of actions the residents hold regarding the future effects of climate change. The approach to climate change should be reconsidered on a municipal level and new small-scale personal incentives should be promoted to maximize resiliency toward coastal hazards in the future.

Measuring Urban Disaster Resilience and Analyzing Influencing Factors: The Case of South Korea

Measuring Urban Disaster Resilience and Analyzing Influencing Factors: The Case of South Korea

100 Resilient Cities program and the role of the Sendai framework and disaster risk reduction for resilient cities

The Rockefeller Foundation launched 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) in 2013 to build worldwide urban resilience. The 100RC program aims to implement urban resilience under the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. These frameworks link disaster resilience and disaster risk reduction to issues of vulnerability, climate change, livelihoods, rebuilding, and equity. Achieving disaster resilience and risk reduction requires more than building back better, or bouncing back from disaster: social equity, participation and livelihoods must also be advanced. Using a pathways approach related to narratives of disaster vulnerability and risk, this paper analyzes the resilience policies developed to support disaster risk reduction under the program. Evaluating member city Resilient Strategies plans using directed and summative content analysis, this research assesses whether the 100RC program emphasized vulnerability and risk narratives in its disaster risk reduction approaches. These results reveal the differences produced among member cities – and from expectations of advancing social equity, livelihoods and participation – due to the role of actors and power expressed in the policy design and implementation. The paper concludes with recommendations to support urban disaster resilience using the Sendai Framework.

Resilient City: A Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization

Resilient city has attracted global attentions as a new concept for cities to deal with risks and challenges in recent years. Numerous researchers have successively conducted in-depth studies on the resilient city from different perspectives. To acquire an overview of resilient city and grasp the current research hotspots, a bibliometric analysis and visualization of the past decade of research on the resilient city was made. The data were collected from 1249 articles published in the Web of Science database from 2010 to 2019. As the widely used bibliometric analysis tools, CiteSpace and VOSviewer were adopted in this study. The temporal distribution of resilient city research, including annual publication outputs and high-cited papers, was symmetrically analyzed. Then, the spatial distribution of resilient city research, including countries, categories, institutions, co-citation journals, author collaboration network, and author co-citation network, was investigated. Hot topics and evolution trends of resilient city were revealed. The results show that the research of resilient city experienced three periods, namely, germination, rapid diffusion, and reflection and innovation periods. Current research focuses on four aspects, including psychological resilience at the microcommunity and group levels, assessment of urban disaster resilience, multiple theoretical frameworks of urban resilience, and urban resilience promotion strategy. Therefore, this study helps scholars and practitioners to gain a comprehensive understanding of the current research progress and evolution trends of the resilient city field.

High-resolution assessment of urban disaster resilience: a case study of Futian District, Shenzhen, China

Quantifying urban disaster resilience is needed to strengthen the capacity of urban disaster prevention and mitigation strategies. In previous studies, the spatial unit used for urban disaster resilience assessment was coarse, which could easily cause local differences to be overlooked. To rectify the problem, this study integrated high spatial-resolution urban grid data and built an index system from economic, social, administrative, and technological dimensions. On this basis, both exponential decay function and spatial analysis techniques were applied to establish a high-precision evaluation method of urban disaster resilience. The results showed that the urban disaster resilience of Futian District (FTUDRI) had a certain spatial aggregation effect, with an average of 0.37 ± 0.08, which was at a middle level. Areas with low and middle-low levels of FTUDRI which accounted for 27.28% were mainly located in the western, northern, and southern edges of Futian District, with undeveloped economy and inadequate emergency infrastructures. We considered the neighborhood impact of point indicators on urban disaster resilience and the results indicated if we neglected this there would be an underestimation of the urban disaster resilience assessment. Hospitals, administrations, and emergency material points were key driving indicators for improving FTUDRI. In conclusion, our results demonstrated the necessity of pursuing high-resolution urban disaster resilience assessments and the effectiveness of the newly proposed method. The results of this study can provide policymakers with a clear location of where a low level of urban disaster resilience occurs, providing a basis for urban disaster prevention and improvement measures.

A Scientometric Review of Urban Disaster Resilience Research.

Natural disasters and human-made disasters are threatening urban areas globally. The resilience capacity of the urban system plays an important role in disaster risk response and recovery. Strengthening urban disaster resilience is also fundamental to ensuring sustainable development. Various practices and research for enhancing urban disaster resilience have been carried out worldwide but are yet to be reviewed. Accordingly, this paper gives a scientometric review of urban disaster resilience research by using CiteSpace. The time span (January 2001–January 2021) was selected and divided into three phases based on the number of publications. In addition, according to keyword statistics and clustering results, the collected articles are grouped into four hotspot topics: disaster risk reduction, specific disaster resilience research, resilience assessment, and combination research. The results show that most of the existing research is in the first two categories, and articles in the second and fourth categories both show a high growth rate and could be further research directions. The review indicates that urban disaster resilience is essential for a city’s sustainable development. Moreover, the findings provide scholars a full picture of the existing urban disaster resilience research which can help them identify promising research directions. The findings can also help urban government officials and policymakers review current urban disaster management strategies and make further improvements.

Measuring Resilience of Urban Slum to Climate Induced Disasters: A Study on Barishal City Corporation, Bangladesh

Measuring urban resilience is one of the important processes toward understanding the potential current and future risks of cities, assessing the challenges of urbanization and to guide the development of urban areas. The research was conducted in a slum named Bangabandhu Colony under Barishal City Corporation (BCC). The purpose of the research was to measure the urban disaster resilience and to find out a better way of future urban disaster resilience in this area. Climate Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI) was used to measure climate-related disaster resilience by considering five dimensions: physical, social, institutional, economic and natural which shows resilience level ranging from 1-5 where 1 representing very poor and 5 best. A semi-structured questionnaire was used for collecting the primary data and the secondary data was collected from secondary sources. Results revealed that the resilience level of physical, social, institutional, economic, and natural dimensions was 2.76, 2.79, 2.29, 2.53, 2.59 respectively, which indicates a medium resilience level of all dimensions. Finally, the research depicted that, the resilience level of the area will increase through hand to hand working of people with government and non-government officials, conducting public awareness programs, campaigns, seminars and discussions. The findings of the research can be used by researchers and development workers for enhancing disaster resilience of other areas under Barishal City Corporation as well as other city areas of Bangladesh.

A Novel Evaluation Approach of County-Level City Disaster Resilience and Urban Environmental Cleanliness Based on SDG11 and Deqing County’s Situation

City disaster resilience and urban environmental cleanliness are two representative indicators used to assess the safety of human settlements in China’s Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs). Traditional research on SDGs mainly concentrated at large-scale spatial level, such as global level or national level. It brings unclear significance to the implementation of SDGs in the county-level. The goal of this paper is to find a new calculation method to apply the index of urban disaster resilience and urban environmental cleanliness to the evaluation of county-level areas. A localization of county-level city disaster resilience and urban environmental cleanliness based on Deqing County’s situation was carried out. With quantification and projections of local data, the assessments of city disaster resilience and urban environmental cleanliness have completed. The evaluation showed that city disaster resilience is maintained at a low level, while indicators of urban cleanliness are lower than standards. The prediction of urban per capita environmental impact index based on Grey Time-Series Prediction Model was finished. The forecast showed that the urban per capita impact indicators in the next three years have not exceeded the standard line. The two indicators used to assess the safety of human settlements were consistent with the sustainable development of urban settlement. Partial results of this research were reported as a “county sample” at the first UN Geographic Information Conference held in Deqing in 2018.

Critical infrastructure and flood resilience: Cascading effects beyond water

AbstractCritical infrastructure and cascading effects are analyzed in this article as cross‐cutting topics in flood risk and resilience. A concept is developed for integrating aspects of disaster risk, hazard, vulnerability and resilience with critical infrastructure analytic components such as redundancy, rapidity or resourcefulness. These components are expressed for each phase of an unfolding flood event and cascading effects are indicated, too. This contribution discusses the implications of such a conceptual frame for the advancement of existing flood risk management concepts. Current international guiding strategies such as the United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the “Making Cities Resilient” campaigns in field of urban disaster resilience, Climate Change Adaptation processes such as the Paris Agreement of the IPCC process, or urban planning in the field of UN HABITAT are all interconnected to the topic of (critical) infrastructure. The article shows how flood risk management can connect to such wider international developments by the conceptual frame discussion presented.This article is categorized under:Engineering Water > Planning WaterScience of Water > Water ExtremesHuman Water > Water Governance