Yuan Zhihang, Hu Wanyang
Department of Public and International Affairs, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, China.
Int J Disaster Risk Reduct. 2023 Jun 1;91:103670. doi: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.103670. Epub 2023 Apr 5.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restrictions have raised the awareness of building pandemic-resilient cities. Prior studies often evaluated the resilience of one type of urban system while lacking a comparison across various urban subsystems. This study fills this gap by measuring and comparing the adaptive resilience to the pandemic of various urban subsystems in Chinese cities. We propose a novel outcome measurement of the pandemic's socioeconomic impacts on cities, i.e., the citizens' complaints data, and use its temporal changes to measure cities' adaptive resilience to the pandemic. We find a wide range of urban subsystems were severely shocked by the pandemic, including the urban economy, construction-and-housing sector, welfare system, and education system. Different urban subsystems exhibit divergent degrees of adaptive resilience to the pandemic. Using cluster analysis, we also identify three types of cities with different patterns of adaptive resilience: cities whose general economies were the least resilient, cities whose construction-and-housing system was the least resilient, and cities that were mostly affected by restriction measures. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the pandemic's socioeconomic costs and help identify the divergent resilience of different urban subsystems so as to develop targeted policy interventions to improve cities' resilience to the pandemic.
新冠疫情及其相关限制措施提高了人们对建设具备疫情抵御能力城市的认识。以往的研究通常只评估某一种城市系统的韧性，而缺乏对不同城市子系统的比较。本研究通过衡量和比较中国城市各城市子系统对疫情的适应性韧性填补了这一空白。我们提出了一种衡量疫情对城市社会经济影响的全新指标，即市民投诉数据，并利用其随时间的变化来衡量城市对疫情的适应性韧性。我们发现，包括城市经济、建筑与住房部门、福利体系和教育系统在内的众多城市子系统都受到了疫情的严重冲击。不同的城市子系统对疫情表现出不同程度的适应性韧性。通过聚类分析，我们还识别出了三种具有不同适应性韧性模式的城市：总体经济韧性最差的城市、建筑与住房系统韧性最差的城市，以及受限制措施影响最大的城市。我们的研究结果有助于理解疫情的社会经济成本，并有助于识别不同城市子系统的不同韧性，从而制定有针对性的政策干预措施，以提高城市对疫情的抵御能力。
