Long-Term Urban Epidemic and Disaster Resilience: The Planning and Assessment of a Comprehensive Underground Resilience Core

Abstract

This study utilizes the enclosed and stable environment of underground space for long-term sustainable planning for urban epidemics and disasters. Owing to the COVID-19 epidemic, cities require long-term epidemic–disaster management. Therefore, this study proposed a strategy for integrating multiple functions to plan a comprehensive Underground Resilience Core (URC). A planning and assessment methods of URC were proposed. With this methodology, epidemic- and disaster- URCs were integrated to construct a comprehensive-URC in underground spaces. The results show: (1) Epidemic-resilient URCs adopting a joint progressive approach with designated hospitals can rapidly suppress an epidemic outbreak. (2) The regularity of the morphology of underground spaces determines the area of the URC. Bar-shaped underground spaces have the potential for planning disaster-URCs. (3) The URC planning efficiency ranking is as follows: Bar shapes lead overall, T shapes are second under seismic resilience, and Cross shapes are second under epidemic resilience. (4) The potential analysis of planning a comprehensive-URC in the underground parking in Chinese cities showed that the recovery time can be advanced from 29% to 39% and the comprehensive resilience can be improved by 37.63%. The results of this study can serve as sustainable urban planning strategies and assessment tools for long-term epidemic–disaster management.