Human-centred and data-driven approaches to enhancing urban resilience

Cities are faced with significant threats from natural hazards, necessitating the enhancement of urban resilience. However, as urban systems grow increasingly complex, these hazards not only cause casualties and direct damage to physical elements such as buildings and infrastructures but also trigger cascading failures within engineering systems and extend impacts to social dimensions like healthcare and human mobility. This talk will discuss our people-centric and data-driven approaches to examining urban systems and their resilience issues. By conceptualizing a city as “a system of systems under trio-spaces”, it proposes a cross-system and cross-dimension approach based on scenario deduction to analysing urban resilience. Computing models are employed to capture the dynamics of residents’ needs as well as urban functionality in the aftermath of natural hazards, which contributes to determining key infrastructure to protect and optimally allocating the limited resources to various systems in the city. This talk will also feature our latest work in understanding, modelling and predicting people’s multi-scale complex spatial behaviours in response to extreme events such as fires and typhoons. Case studies will be provided to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approaches to analysing urban resilience.