Which urban communities are susceptible to COVID-19? An empirical study through the lens of community resilience

Background After the lockdown of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, the government used community-based pandemic prevention and control as the core strategy to fight the pandemic, and explored a set of standardized community pandemic prevention measures that were uniformly implemented throughout the city. One month later, the city announced its first lists of “high-risk” communities and COVID-19-free communities. Under the standardized measures of pandemic prevention and mitigation, why some communities showed a high degree of resilience and effectively avoided escalation, while the situation spun out of control in other communities? This study investigated: 1) key factors that affect the effective response of urban communities to the pandemic, and 2) types of COVID-19 susceptible communities. Methods This study employs the crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis method to explore the influencing variables and possible causal condition combination paths that affect community resilience during the pandemic outbreak. Relying on extreme-case approach, 26 high-risk communities and 14 COVID-19 free communities were selected as empirical research subjects from the lists announced by Wuhan government. The community resilience assessment framework that evaluates the communities’ capacity on pandemic prevention and mitigation covers four dimensions, namely spatial resilience, capital resilience, social resilience, and governance resilience, each dimension is measured by one to three variables. Results The results of measuring the necessity of 7 single-condition variables found that the consistency index of “whether the physical structure of the community is favorable to virus transmission” reached 0.9, which constitutes a necessary condition for COVID-19 susceptible communities. By analyzing the seven condition configurations with high row coverage and unique coverage in the obtained complex solutions and intermediate solutions, we found that outbreaks are most likely to occur in communities populated by disadvantaged populations. However, if lacking spatial-, capital-, and governance resilience, middle-class and even wealthy communities could also become areas where COVID-19 spreads easily. Conclusions Three types of communities namely vulnerable communities, alienated communities, and inefficient communities have lower risk resilience. Spatial resilience, rather than social resilience, constitutes the key influencing factor of COVID-19-susceptible communities, and the dual deficiencies of social resilience and governance resilience are the common features of these communities.

Floodplain Inhabitation: A Socio-Spatial Resilience Network

<p>The inadequacy of current approaches to managing floodplain inhabitation was highlighted in the 2010-11 Queensland, northern New South Wales and Victorian floods; the most costly floods in Australia’s history. Despite technological advancements and the prevalence of flood mitigation infrastructure, floods continue to have widespread adverse physical, social, economic, and emotional impacts. This situation is mirrored internationally and is anticipated to worsen as scientists predict an increase in the severity and prevalence of natural disasters such as flooding. In response to this, management of floodplain inhabitation must shift from flood prevention to adaptation. Adaptation is a key term in ecological resilience, defined as the capacity of a system to adapt and persist in the face of disturbance (Holling 1976). Hendstra et al (2004) suggests that in the context of disaster-resilient cities, resilience can be defined as the “capacity to adapt to stress from hazards and the ability to recover quickly from their impacts” (Henstra, Kovacs, McBean, & Sweeting, 2004, p. 5). Analysis of ecosystems reveals that interdependence across scales, variety, redundancy, adaptability and feedback are the key resilience principles enabling the system to adapt and maintain stability during flooding. At present there is a sparsity of literature exploring spatial resilience approaches to improving floodplain inhabitation. Whilst amphibious approaches improve individual resilience, there is a lack of innovative solutions to improve community and city resilience to flooding. Resilience approaches have the potential to reduce safety concerns, financial losses and the emotional stress associated with residing on Australian floodplains. Such approaches acknowledge the interconnected nature of riverine floodplains and their inhabitants. However resilience principles need to be given a physical spatial function within specific social contexts. Architecture provides a platform to test new and retrofit adaptable approaches to promote a more suitable spatial relationship with the river. This thesis will take the theory and literature of resilience and apply it to a site-specific spatial context: Maitland. Maitland city is built on one of the most flood prone regions in New South Wales (Keys, 1999). Despite the Hunter Valley Flood Mitigation Scheme, which consists of 170 kilometers of levees and flood control structures, flooding continues to occur in and around Maitland. Regardless of these flood risks, Maitland City Council is proposing large scale residential development on the floodplain to encourage population increase. Maitland will be used as the primary case study for investigating the opportunities socio-spatial resilience interventions have for improving the longterm inhabitation of the floodplain. This thesis proposes a multi-scaled approach to examine flood hazard and exposure at the individual, community, city and regional scale. As spatial designers it is imperative that architects play a part in this explorative process</p>

Floodplain Inhabitation: A Socio-Spatial Resilience Network

<p>The inadequacy of current approaches to managing floodplain inhabitation was highlighted in the 2010-11 Queensland, northern New South Wales and Victorian floods; the most costly floods in Australia’s history. Despite technological advancements and the prevalence of flood mitigation infrastructure, floods continue to have widespread adverse physical, social, economic, and emotional impacts. This situation is mirrored internationally and is anticipated to worsen as scientists predict an increase in the severity and prevalence of natural disasters such as flooding. In response to this, management of floodplain inhabitation must shift from flood prevention to adaptation. Adaptation is a key term in ecological resilience, defined as the capacity of a system to adapt and persist in the face of disturbance (Holling 1976). Hendstra et al (2004) suggests that in the context of disaster-resilient cities, resilience can be defined as the “capacity to adapt to stress from hazards and the ability to recover quickly from their impacts” (Henstra, Kovacs, McBean, & Sweeting, 2004, p. 5). Analysis of ecosystems reveals that interdependence across scales, variety, redundancy, adaptability and feedback are the key resilience principles enabling the system to adapt and maintain stability during flooding. At present there is a sparsity of literature exploring spatial resilience approaches to improving floodplain inhabitation. Whilst amphibious approaches improve individual resilience, there is a lack of innovative solutions to improve community and city resilience to flooding. Resilience approaches have the potential to reduce safety concerns, financial losses and the emotional stress associated with residing on Australian floodplains. Such approaches acknowledge the interconnected nature of riverine floodplains and their inhabitants. However resilience principles need to be given a physical spatial function within specific social contexts. Architecture provides a platform to test new and retrofit adaptable approaches to promote a more suitable spatial relationship with the river. This thesis will take the theory and literature of resilience and apply it to a site-specific spatial context: Maitland. Maitland city is built on one of the most flood prone regions in New South Wales (Keys, 1999). Despite the Hunter Valley Flood Mitigation Scheme, which consists of 170 kilometers of levees and flood control structures, flooding continues to occur in and around Maitland. Regardless of these flood risks, Maitland City Council is proposing large scale residential development on the floodplain to encourage population increase. Maitland will be used as the primary case study for investigating the opportunities socio-spatial resilience interventions have for improving the longterm inhabitation of the floodplain. This thesis proposes a multi-scaled approach to examine flood hazard and exposure at the individual, community, city and regional scale. As spatial designers it is imperative that architects play a part in this explorative process</p>

Measuring Spatial Justice Indices in the Traditional Islamic Cities by Using GIS, An-Najaf Holy City, Iraq A Case Study

Iraq includes several traditional Islamic cities, and they share many spatial and social characteristics. A question has often been raised about these cities' ability to achieve spatial justice for their current residents. Therefore, the research aims to answer this question by following a specific methodology based on the derivation of factors and indices of spatial justice through previous literature, then measuring the indices derived in the ancient Najaf city as an example of traditional Islamic cities. The research found that there are five main factors for spatial justice, which are: spatial diversity, spatial connectivity, spatial resilience, spatial security, and spatial empowerment, which in turn are divided into ten indices. These indices were measured in Najaf city. It became clear that the mixed land use index, spatial connectivity indices, and spatial security indices were well achieved, while the mixed residential patterns and spatial empowerment indices did not achieve well. As for spatial resilience, changes occurred in the land uses. However, these changes were not the result of social and cultural changes or according to the city residents' needs. Instead, they occurred due to economic changes that primarily serve the visitors and arrivals to the city.