Yang Tinghui, Yu Nannan, Yang Tianren, Hong Tao
School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, 13 Fayuan Street, Nangang District, Harbin, 150001, China.
Department of Urban Planning and Design, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Central/Western District, Hong Kong, 999077, China.
Int J Disaster Risk Reduct. 2023 May;90:103643. doi: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.103643. Epub 2023 Mar 22.
The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak significantly challenged the cities' abilities to recover from shocks, and cities' responses have widely differed. Understanding these disparate responses has been insufficient, especially from a social recovery perspective. In this study, we propose the concept of social recovery and develop a comprehensive perspective on how a city's socioeconomic characteristics affect it. The analytical framework is applied to 296 prefecture-level cities in China, with social recovery measured by the changes in intercity intensity between the pre-pandemic baseline (2019 Q1 and Q2) and the period in which the pandemic slightly abated (2020 Q1 and Q2) through anonymized location-based big data. The results indicate that the social recovery of Chinese cities during the COVID-19 pandemic are significantly spatially correlated. Cities with larger populations, a higher proportion of GDP in the secondary industry, higher road density or more adequate medical resources tend to recover socially better. Moreover, these municipal characteristics have significant spatial spillover effects. Specifically, city size, government intervention and industrial structure show negative spillover effects on neighboring areas while information dissemination efficiency, road density, and the number of community health services per capita have positive spillover. This study fills the knowledge gap regarding the different performances of cities when they face pandemic shocks. The assessment of a city's social recovery is an insight into the theoretical framework of vulnerability that aids in translating it into urban resilience. Hence our findings provide practice implications for China and beyond as the interest in urban-resilience development surges around the post-pandemic world.
新冠疫情的爆发给城市从冲击中恢复的能力带来了巨大挑战，而且不同城市的应对措施差异很大。目前对这些不同的应对措施了解不足，尤其是从社会恢复的角度来看。在本研究中，我们提出了社会恢复的概念，并就城市的社会经济特征如何影响社会恢复形成了一个全面的视角。该分析框架应用于中国296个地级市，通过匿名的基于位置的大数据，以疫情前基线（2019年第一季度和第二季度）与疫情稍有缓解时期（2020年第一季度和第二季度）之间城市间强度的变化来衡量社会恢复情况。结果表明，新冠疫情期间中国城市的社会恢复在空间上存在显著相关性。人口较多、第二产业占GDP比重较高、道路密度较高或医疗资源较充足的城市，其社会恢复情况往往更好。此外，这些城市特征具有显著的空间溢出效应。具体而言，城市规模、政府干预和产业结构对周边地区呈现负向溢出效应，而信息传播效率、道路密度和人均社区卫生服务数量则具有正向溢出效应。本研究填补了关于城市在面对疫情冲击时不同表现方面的知识空白。对城市社会恢复情况的评估有助于深入了解脆弱性的理论框架，并将其转化为城市韧性。因此，随着疫情后世界对城市韧性发展的兴趣激增，我们的研究结果为中国及其他地区提供了实践启示。
