Resilience as an emergent property of human-infrastructure dynamics: A multi-agent simulation model for characterizing regime shifts and tipping point behaviors in infrastructure systems

COVID-19 and campus users: A longitudinal and place-based study of university mobilities in Texas

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted people's daily routines, including travel behaviors, social interactions, and work-related activities. However, the potential impacts of COVID-19 on the use of campus locations in higher education such as libraries, food courts, sports facilities, and other destinations are still unknown. Focusing on three largest universities in Texas (Texas A&M university, the University of Texas at Austin, and Texas Tech University), this study compares changes in campus destination visitations between pre and post COVID-19 outbreak (2019 Fall and 2021 Fall semesters, respectively) using the mobility data from SafeGraph. It also examines the potential moderation effects of walkable distance (i.e. 1 km) and greenery (i.e. NDVI value). The results presented the significant effects of COVID-19 on decreasing visitations to various campus places. The visitation decreased more significantly for people living within 1 km (defined as a walkable distance) of campus and for the food, eating, and drinking places and the sports, recreation, and sightseeing places. This finding suggests that those living near campus (mostly students) decreased their reliance on campus destinations, especially for eating/drinking and recreation purposes. The level of greeneries at/around campus destinations did not moderate campus visitations after COVID-19. Policy implications on campus health and urban planning were discussed.

Spatial-Temporal Evolution and Driving Factors of the Coupling Coordination between Urbanization and Urban Resilience: A Case Study of the 167 Counties in Hebei Province

Urban resilience, as an important ability to deal with disasters in the process of urbanization, has been paid more and more attention as the result of the increasing risks that are caused by rapid urbanization. China is taking the county level as the basic unit to promote new-type urbanization and constructing resilient cities has become one of the development strategies. However, to achieve this strategy researchers need to analyze the interaction between county urbanization and urban resilience and its driving mechanism, which have been paid little attention. Therefore, this paper selected 167 counties in Hebei Province as the investigation subject. Based on the statistical data from 2010 to 2020, a comprehensive index system was developed to quantify the degree of coupling coordination between urbanization and urban resilience, and the spatial Durbin model was used to analyze the driving mechanism of it. The study shows that: Firstly, the urbanization level of counties rose year after year, with there being a geographical distribution that was "lower from southeast to northwest". The level of urban resilience increased year after year, showing a geographical distribution that was "higher from south to north" and a "core-edge" feature that was localized. Secondly, the coupling coordination degree increased steadily, and the overall level changed from a basic imbalance to a mild imbalance. In space, it is bounded by "Pingquan City-Pingshan County", which showed the distribution of "high in the east and low in the west, high in the center and low on the outskirts". Thirdly, the coupling coordination degree has spatial spillover effect. Government financial expenditure, innovation level, industrial upgrading level and urban shape index all influence the coupling coordination degree positively, with a successively decreasing impact, while the urban compactness has significant negative impacts. This study indicates that the regional differences exist in the coupling coordination degree, and the counties in different development stages need to adopt different strategies to promote the coordinated development of urbanized and resilient cities. Inter-regional support is also necessary in this process. Meanwhile, it is necessary for the government to govern various urban elements, especially in terms of their urban form.

Rethinking Healthcare Teams’ Practices Using Network Science: Implications, Challenges, and Benefits

Healthcare teams act in a very complex environment and present extremely peculiar features since they are multidisciplinary, work under quickly changing conditions, and often stay together for a short period with a dynamically fluctuating team membership. Thus, in the broad discussions about the future of healthcare, the strategy for improving providers’ collaboration and team dynamics is becoming a central topic. Within this context, this paper aims to discuss different viewpoints about the application of network science to teamworking. Our results highlight the potential benefits deriving from network science-enabled analysis, and also show some preliminary empirical evidence through a real case study. In so doing, we intend to stimulate discussions regarding the implications of network science in the investigation and improvement of healthcare teams. The intention is to pave the way for future research in this context by suggesting the potential advantages of healthcare teamwork analysis, as well as recognising its challenges and threats.

Resilience in Infrastructure Systems: A Comprehensive Review

When encountering crisis events, systems, organizations, and people must react and handle these unpredictable events. Under these circumstances, important social functions and infrastructures must be restored or adapted as quickly as possible. This capacity refers to resilience. Although considerable research has been conducted on the resilience of infrastructure systems over the past years, a critical review of these studies remains lacking. Therefore, this study aims to bridge the knowledge gap by presenting a comprehensive review of infrastructure research conducted in the past decade, namely, from 2011 to 2021. On the basis of a systematic search, this study identified 222 journal articles investigating infrastructure resilience. A review of the identified papers revealed five research streams in the area of infrastructure resilience (IR), namely, the assessment of infrastructure resilience, improvement of infrastructure resilience, conceptualizing infrastructure resilience from various perspectives, factors influencing infrastructure resilience, and the prediction of infrastructure resilience. This study also presented some directions that future research can pursue. These directions include analyzing factors influencing infrastructure resilience based on simulation, assessing the resilience of green infrastructure, improving the resilience of interdependent infrastructure, and predicting the resilience of infrastructure based on empirical research.

A shared future: chemistry's engagement is essential for resilience of people and planet

Strengthening resilience-elasticity or adaptive capacity-is essential in responding to the wide range of natural hazards and anthropogenic changes humanity faces. Chemistry's roles in resilience are explored for the first time, with its technical capacities set in the wider contexts of cross-disciplinary working and the intersecting worlds of science, society and policy. The roles are framed by chemistry's contributions to the sustainability of people and planet, examined via the human security framework's four material aspects of food, health, economic and environmental security. As the science of transformation of matter, chemistry is deeply involved in these material aspects and in their interfacing with human security's three societal and governance aspects of personal, community and political security. Ultimately, strengthening resilience requires making choices about the present use of resources as a hedge against future hazards and adverse events, with these choices being co-determined by technical capacities and social and political will. It is argued that, to intensify its contributions to resilience, chemistry needs to take action along at least three major lines: (i) taking an integrative approach to the field of 'chemistry and resilience'; (ii) rethinking how the chemical industry operates; and (iii) engaging more with society and policy-makers.

Determinants of Risk Disparity Due to Infrastructure Service Losses in Disasters: A Household Service Gap Model

The objective of this article is to systematically assess and identify factors affecting risk disparity due to infrastructure service disruptions in extreme weather events. We propose a household service gap model that characterizes societal risks at the household level by examining service disruptions as threats, level of tolerance of households to disruptions as susceptibility, and experienced hardship as an indicator for the realized impacts of risk. The concept of "zone of tolerance" for the service disruptions was encapsulated to account for different capabilities of the households to endure the adverse impacts. The model was tested and validated in the context of power outages through survey data from the residents of Harris County in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017. The results show that households' need for utility service, preparedness level, the existence of substitutes, possession of social capital, previous experience with disasters, and risk communication affect the zone of tolerance within which households cope with service outages. In addition, sociodemographic characteristics, such as race and residence type, are shown to influence the zone of tolerance, and hence the level of hardship experienced by the affected households. The results reveal that population subgroups show variations in the tolerance level of service disruptions. The findings highlight the importance of integrating social dimensions into the resilience planning of infrastructure systems. The proposed model and results enable human-centric hazards mitigation and resilience planning to effectively reduce the risk disparity of vulnerable populations to service disruptions in disasters.

Resilience Assessment and Critical Point Identification for Urban Water Supply Systems under Uncertain Scenarios

The urban water supply system environment is becoming more complicated and unpredictable than ever before in the context of global climate change and expanding urbanization. Existing studies have adopted either static or dynamic approaches to assess the resilience of water supply systems without combining the two. Previous literature mostly establishes rigid quantitative metrics for resilience assessment, often without depicting the dynamics and adaptability of system resilience. For example, these studies usually fail to provide a critical point for identifying system resilience. To accurately describe the dynamics and adaptability of water supply system resilience under uncertain scenarios, in this study, we constructed a comprehensive framework based on the qualitative assessment of the input parameters, combining static and dynamic assessment, with the latter playing a dominant role based on the system perspective of pressure–state–influence–response. Taking Qingdao as a case study, we combined this framework with the system resilience theory, and statically assessed the five types of capitals and three attributes of resilience with the capital portfolio approach (CPA). Then, we dynamically assessed the resilience of urban water supply systems and identified critical points with the dynamic socio-technical model coupled with system resilience and the fitting analysis method. The results are as follows: (1) the static assessment results demonstrate an imbalanced development in the levels of the five types of capitals (financial capital, management efficiency, infrastructure, available water resources, and adaptation) and three attributes (robustness, recoverability, and adaptability) in the water supply systems of Qingdao. (2) The dynamic assessment results show that the current resilience trajectory of the water supply systems in Qingdao is that of a city in transition. (3) The fitting analysis shows that robustness (RB) has a linear relationship with resilience, recoverability (RE) has a non-linear relationship with resilience, and the critical points are RB = 0.70 and RE = 1.20. The research findings provide a reference for studying resilience mechanisms, internal attribute relationships, and resilience enhancement measures of urban water supply systems.

Quantifying community resilience based on fluctuations in visits to points-of-interest derived from digital trace data

This research establishes a methodological framework for quantifying community resilience based on fluctuations in a population's activity during a natural disaster. Visits to points-of-interests (POIs) over time serve as a proxy for activities to capture the combined effects of perturbations in lifestyles, the built environment and the status of business. This study used digital trace data related to unique visits to POIs in the Houston metropolitan area during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Resilience metrics in the form of systemic impact, duration of impact, and general resilience (GR) values were examined for the region along with their spatial distributions. The results show that certain categories, such as religious organizations and building material and supplies dealers had better resilience metrics-low systemic impact, short duration of impact, and high GR. Other categories such as medical facilities and entertainment had worse resilience metrics-high systemic impact, long duration of impact and low GR. Spatial analyses revealed that areas in the community with lower levels of resilience metrics also experienced extensive flooding. This insight demonstrates the validity of the approach proposed in this study for quantifying and analysing data for community resilience patterns using digital trace/location-intelligence data related to population activities. While this study focused on the Houston metropolitan area and only analysed one natural hazard, the same approach could be applied to other communities and disaster contexts. Such resilience metrics bring valuable insight into prioritizing resource allocation in the recovery process.

Landscape Design toward Urban Resilience: Bridging Science and Physical Design Coupling Sociohydrological Modeling and Design Process

Given that evolving urban systems require ever more sophisticated and creative solutions to deal with uncertainty, designing for resilience in contemporary landscape architecture represents a cross-disciplinary endeavor. While there is a breadth of research on landscape resilience within the academy, the findings of this research are seldom making their way into physical practice. There are existent gaps between the objective, scientific method of scientists and the more intuitive qualitative language of designers and practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge these gaps and ultimately support an endemic process for more resilient landscape design creation. This paper proposes a framework that integrates analytic research (i.e., modeling and examination) and design creation (i.e., place-making) using processes that incorporate feedback to help adaptively achieve resilient design solutions. Concepts of Geodesign and Planning Support Systems (PSSs) are adapted as part of the framework to emphasize the importance of modeling, assessment, and quantification as part of processes for generating information useful to designers. This paper tests the suggested framework by conducting a pilot study using a coupled sociohydrological model. The relationships between runoff and associated design factors are examined. Questions on how analytic outcomes can be translated into information for landscape design are addressed along with some ideas on how key variables in the model can be translated into useful design information. The framework and pilot study support the notion that the creation of resilient communities would be greatly enhanced by having a navigable bridge between science and practice.

Social Barriers and the Hiatus from Successful Green Stormwater Infrastructure Implementation across the US

Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), a nature-inspired, engineered stormwater management approach, has been increasingly implemented and studied especially over the last two decades. Though recent studies have elucidated the social benefits of GSI implementation in addition to its environmental and economic benefits, the social factors that influence its implementation remain under-explored thus, there remains a need to understand social barriers on decisions for GSI. This review draws interdisciplinary research attention to the connections between such social barriers and the potentially underlying cognitive biases that can influence rational decision making. Subsequently, this study reviewed the agent-based modeling (ABM) approach in decision support for promoting innovative strategies in water management for long-term resilience at an individual level. It is suggested that a collaborative and simultaneous effort in governance transitioning, public engagement, and adequate considerations of demographic constraints are crucial to successful GSI acceptance and implementation in the US.

Human-centric infrastructure resilience: Uncovering well-being risk disparity due to infrastructure disruptions in disasters

The objective of this paper is to empirically examine the impacts of infrastructure service disruptions on the well-being of vulnerable populations during disasters. There are limited studies that empirically evaluate the extent to which disruptions in infrastructure system services impact subpopulation groups differently and how these impacts relate to the wellbeing of households. Being able to systematically capture the differential experiences of sub-populations in a community due to infrastructure disruptions is necessary to highlight the differential needs and inequities that households have. In order to address this knowledge gap, this study derives an empirical relationship between sociodemographic factors of households and their subjective well-being impacts due to disruptions in various infrastructure services during and immediately after Hurricane Harvey. Statistical analysis driven by spearman-rank order correlations and fisher-z tests indicated significant disparities in well-being due to service disruptions among vulnerable population groups. The characterization of subjective well-being is used to explain to what extent infrastructure service disruptions influence different subpopulations. The results show that: (1) disruptions in transportation, solid waste, food, and water infrastructure services resulted in more significant well-being impact disparities as compared to electricity and communication services; (2) households identifying as Black and African American experienced well-being impact due to disruptions in food, transportation, and solid waste services; and (3) households were more likely to feel helpless, difficulty doing daily tasks and feeling distance from their community as a result of service disruptions. The findings present novel insights into understanding the role of infrastructure resilience in household well-being and highlights why it is so important to use approaches that consider various factors. Infrastructure resilience models tend to be monolithic. The results provide empirical and quantitative evidence of the inequalities in well-being impacts across various sub-populations. The research approach and findings enable a paradigm shift towards a more human-centric approach to infrastructure resilience.

Modeling of inter-organizational coordination dynamics in resilience planning of infrastructure systems: A multilayer network simulation framework

This paper proposes and tests a multilayer framework for simulating the network dynamics of inter-organizational coordination among interdependent infrastructure systems (IISs) in resilience planning. Inter-organizational coordination among IISs (such as transportation, flood control, and emergency management) would greatly affect the effectiveness of resilience planning. Hence, it is important to examine and understand the dynamics of coordination in networks of organizations within and across various systems in resilience planning. To capture the dynamic nature of coordination frequency and the heterogeneity of organizations, this paper proposes a multilayer network simulation framework enabling the characterization of inter-organizational coordination dynamics within and across IISs. In the proposed framework, coordination probabilities are utilized to approximate the varying levels of collaboration among organizations. Based on these derived collaborations, the simulation process perturbs intra-layer or inter-layer links and unveils the level of inter-organizational coordination within and across IISs. To test the proposed framework, the study examined a multilayer collaboration network of 35 organizations from five infrastructure systems within Harris County, Texas, based on the data gathered from a survey in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. The results indicate that prior to Hurricane Harvey: (1) coordination among organizations across different infrastructure systems is less than the coordination within the individual systems; (2) organizations from the community development system had a low level of coordination for hazard mitigation with organizations in flood control and transportation systems; (3) achieving a greater level of coordination among organizations across infrastructure systems is more difficult and would require a greater frequency of interaction (compared to within-system coordination). The results show the capability of the proposed multilayer network simulation framework to examine inter-organizational coordination dynamics at the system level (e.g., within and across IISs). The assessment of inter-organizational coordination within and across IISs sheds light on important organizational interdependencies in IISs and leads to recommendations for improving the resilience planning process.