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2022 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunyu Shi ◽  
Liao Liao ◽  
Huan Li ◽  
Zhenhua Su

Abstract 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.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne M. Regnante ◽  
Upal Basu Roy ◽  
Catina O'Leary ◽  
Linda M. Fleisher ◽  
Diane W. Webb ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Florencia Quesada

Living in the city’s ravines is the common destiny of thousands of poor urban dwellers in Guatemala City, as is too often the case elsewhere in the Global South. The ravines surrounding the city represent one of the most visible and unjust urban spaces in the nation’s capital. At the same time, Guatemala City has been among the most violent cities in the world and is highly vulnerable to climate change. Employing a critical spatial perspective and drawing on interviews in two at‐risk communities—Arzú and 5 de Noviembre—this article examines the social production of such peripheral spaces. The levels of exclusion and inequalities are analysed by focusing on the multiple manifestations (visible and invisible) of violence and environmental risks, and deciphering the complex dynamics of both issues, which in turn generate more unequal and harmful conditions for residents. This article draws on the theoretical ideas elaborated by Edward Soja, Mustafa Dikeç, and Teresa Caldeira on the contextualisation of spatial injustice and peripheral urbanisation to study the specific conditions of urban life and analyse the collective struggles of people in both communities to improve their current living conditions and mitigate the risk and the precariousness of their existence. The article underlines the need to make the processes of urban exclusion and extreme inequality visible to better understand how they have been socially and politically constructed. The research argues for more socially and ecologically inclusive cities within the process of unequal urbanisation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-55
Author(s):  
Kirk Jalbert ◽  
Katherine Ball ◽  
Noa Bruhis ◽  
Sakshi Hegde ◽  
Lisa Test

Northeast Arizona’s Holbrook Basin is an epicenter in the rush to secure new helium deposits in the U.S. While the helium boom has revealed unease amongst residents, significant knowledge and procedural gaps have prevented the public from making sense of the industry and its potential impacts. These gaps are produced by the opacity of critical minerals extraction, long-term regulatory neglect, and lack of commitments to public participation in environmental governance. However, we suggest that engaged STS scholarship can meaningfully assist at-risk communities in navigating these complexities. This is illustrated in a series of workshops developed by STS researchers and residents for the purpose of building local capacity for independent research and knowledge production. We detail the mutual affordances of these workshops and offer a potentially replicable framework: The Capabilities Model for Social Learning in Engaged STS. We conclude by arguing that this model is a useful lens for examining how STS critical thinking can be leveraged in collaborative research to pursue long-term social change.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001391652110641
Author(s):  
Amanda Wallis ◽  
Ronald Fischer ◽  
Wokje Abrahamse

Research shows that place attachment is associated with disaster preparedness. In two studies we examined (1) participants’ place attachment at different spatial scales, (2) participants’ preparedness (intentions and behaviors), and (3) place attachment as a mediator of previously identified demographic predictors of preparedness. Our findings show that place attachment is associated with both preparedness intentions and behavior. When controlling for socio-demographic predictors, participants who reported stronger house and neighborhood attachment also reported stronger intentions to prepare (Study 1). In Study 2, house attachment was associated with mitigative preparedness behavior, whereas neighborhood attachment was associated with community preparedness behavior. House and neighborhood attachment mediated the relationship between home ownership, length of residence, and preparedness. These findings suggest that place attachment varies by spatial scale which matters for different types of disaster preparedness. House and neighborhood attachment should be considered as relevant predictors of mitigative and community preparedness in at-risk communities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marinda Mortlock ◽  
Marike Geldenhuys ◽  
Muriel Dietrich ◽  
Jonathan H. Epstein ◽  
Jacqueline Weyer ◽  
...  

AbstractBat-borne viruses in the Henipavirus genus have been associated with zoonotic diseases of high morbidity and mortality in Asia and Australia. In Africa, the Egyptian rousette bat species (Rousettus aegyptiacus) is an important viral host in which Henipavirus-related viral sequences have previously been identified. We expanded these findings by assessing the viral dynamics in a southern African bat population. A longitudinal study of henipavirus diversity and excretion dynamics identified 18 putative viral species circulating in a local population, three with differing seasonal dynamics, and the winter and spring periods posing a higher risk of virus spillover and transmission. The annual peaks in virus excretion are most likely driven by subadults and may be linked to the waning of maternal immunity and recolonization of the roost in early spring. These results provide insightful information into the bat-host relationship that can be extrapolated to other populations across Africa and be communicated to at-risk communities as a part of evidence-based public health education and prevention measures against pathogen spillover threats.


IJID Regions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tasnim Hasan ◽  
Pham Ngoc Thach ◽  
Nguyen Thu Anh ◽  
Le Thi Thu Hien ◽  
Nguyen Thi Mai An ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Thomas Jamieson

<p>Despite an increasing willingness among academics politicians, policymakers, non-governmental organisations [NGOs], businesses, practitioners and citizens to confront the risks posed by disasters, many attempts at implementing measures of disaster risk reduction [DRR] have been unsuccessful. Much has been written about disaster risk reduction, but none of the literature has effectively analysed the necessary conditions for disaster risk reduction to be successful in an at-risk community.  Van Belle argues that the localisation of distant disasters – the practice where a news outlet covers an external event from their own locality’s point of view and interprets that event in terms of how it relates to them – is essential for DRR to become on the public agenda and create the opportunity for DRR policy to be successfully pursued (2012). This thesis adds to the understanding of the news coverage of non-local disaster events by analysing how disasters are localised by the news media to relate to the hazards faced by their communities. It was found that overseas disaster events must not only be localised, but also communalised through direct comparisons between communities in the news coverage for DRR to become on the public agenda in at-risk communities.  229 newspaper articles were analysed through a structured qualitative content analysis. Localisation occurred in the Seattle Times and the Vancouver Sun following six overseas earthquakes. It was found that the nature of the coverage changed according to the stricken country’s level of development, where more direct comparisons were made between communities after the earthquakes in Japan, Chile and in Turkey in some instances. However, the coverage of the earthquakes in Turkey, Pakistan and Haiti led to the establishment of a paternalistic victim-saviour type relationship between communities in the newspapers.  These findings have significant implications for the implementation of disaster risk reduction in at-risk communities and for the understanding of the production of news. Additionally, the theoretical practice of localisation was developed and operationalised. This led to the formulation of five typologies of localisation that illustrated the nature of the coverage of the earthquakes in the two leading broadsheet newspapers in the Pacific Northwest. Significantly, the thesis suggests that the nature of the localisation may depend on their level of identification with the stricken community.</p>


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