Community Resilience Evaluation and Construction Strategies in the Perspective of Public Health Emergencies: A Case Study of Six Communities in Nanjing

Abstract

The theory of resilience has undergone three stages: engineering, ecological, and evolutionary. It has been developed in various professional fields, focusing on research scales such as urban resilience and community resilience. As the smallest unit of urban composition, the community serves as the principal carrier of numerous emergencies at the grassroots level. Its resilience construction level is somewhat connected to the city’s safe development. However, there is still a lack of a systematic evaluation framework for assessing community resilience, and studies from the perspective of public health safety also lack scientific quantitative results and dynamic analysis. In order to fully understand the connotation of resilient community in the combination of epidemic prevention and control, this study employs literature crawling and high-frequency vocabulary screening to construct a three-level resilience index. Taking into consideration both physical and social factors, a community resilience evaluation system with 4 core indicators, 14 secondary indicators, and 39 tertiary indicators is established by employing the resilience matrix (RM) framework and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). It set up a collection quantification path based on the properties of multivariate data and weighted the indicators using the Delphi method. Taking the typical community in Xuanwu District, Nanjing, as the research sample, the differentiated performance during the COVID-19 pandemic is analyzed, and a systematic evaluation and scoring are conducted. The resilience composition and improvement directions of each sample are interpreted and analyzed to support the formulation of future sustainability strategies as much as possible. The study developed an evaluation approach combining three time periods and four response dimensions to demonstrate a relationship between complex factors and community resilience. The expandable resilience evaluation system offers a wide range of applications and serves as a scientific reference for strengthening community resilience, which is critical for urban sustainability.