Linkage Between the Environment and Individual Resilience to Urban Flooding: A Case Study of Shenzhen, China

Abstract

Resilience is widely accepted as the capacities implemented to manage climate change. Exploring how individual resilience can be enhanced to better prepare residents for natural disasters, such as urban flooding, is therefore necessary. Environmental cognitions that provide psychological and physiological benefits to people by adding motivation to interact with the place are factors influencing people’s resilience-oriented behaviors but have largely been ignored in existing research. As such, this study establishes a framework for the concept of individual resilience to urban flooding. Gongming, a sub-district of Shenzhen, China, is considered the case area wherein individual resilience and its environmental determinants are evaluated. Through hierarchical linear modeling, the environmental determinants of individual resilience at the individual and community levels are identified. At the individual level, the main factors are a few green spaces, low quality of the built environment, mutual distrust and lack of well-being perceived by residents. At the community level, the results suggest that the social environment, particularly its gatedness, is pivotal to individual resilience. This study offers an approach for analyzing factors that limit individual resilience from the environmental perspective, thereby providing a basis for formulating corresponding policy recommendations to effectively improve resilience through urban planning. © 2019 by the authors.