Spatial-Temporal Assessment of Urban Resilience to Disasters: A Case Study in Chengdu, China

Abstract

Urban areas with an imbalanced vulnerability to disasters have garnered attention. Building an urban resilience index helps to develop a progressively favored instrument for tracking progress toward disaster-resilient cities. However, there remains a lack of empirical studies on measuring urban resilience, with limited focus on the spatial-temporal characteristics of urban resilience to disasters, particularly relevant in developing nations like China. Thus, a refined urban resilience index to disasters based on the subcomponents of infrastructure, environment, socio-economy, and institution is suggested in this study. This index-based assessment framework is applied and validated to measure the spatial-temporal resilience using a real-world case study in Chengdu, China. The main findings of this study indicate that: (1) the overall urban resilience of Chengdu has been growing toward better conditions, with infrastructural resilience accounting for the majority of this growth. (2) The distribution of urban resilience exhibits a regional disparity and a spatially polarized pattern. (3) The agglomeration characteristics of urban resilience are significant. (4) There is a clear regional mismatch in the distribution of urban resilience to disaster risk. The validated model offers a comprehensive and replicable approach for urban resilience assessment and planning, especially for disaster-frequent regions.