On 21 Oct 2024, Prof. Dongping Fang from the School of Civil Engineering at Tsinghua University visited the CNERC-Rail at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and gave a talk on ‘People-centric Approach for Improving Urban Resilience’.
Urban areas confront considerable risks from natural disasters, requiring the fortification of resilience. This research creates methodical, people-centered frameworks to analyze urban systems and resilience concerns. Prof. Dongping Fang suggests a cross-system and cross-dimension method based on scenario deduction to analyze urban resilience by viewing a city as "a system of systems under trio-spaces (physical, societal, and cyber)". The cornerstone for evaluating urban resilience is the "Quality of Life (QoL)"-based framework, which is designed to measure the functionality of complex urban systems. Hypernetwork modeling, integrated with data-driven techniques, is employed to capture the dynamics of residents’ needs 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. Case studies carried out in two Chinese cities, Beijing and Mianzhu, demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approaches to assessing and enhancing urban resilience.
