Resilience provides an adaptive approach for dealing with environmental change, natural risks and public health emergencies. Urban spatial resilience is an interpretation of resilience in the spatial dimension. However, studies on urban spatial resilience and the relationship between resilience and urban space are limited. This study tries to understand urban spatial systems and to establish an urban spatial resilience theoretical framework by integrating resilience into urban spaces to reduce urban risks. This article describes urban spatial resilience by identifying a set of urban spatial factors that may affect resilience and by linking spatial elements and resilience characteristics. The theoretical framework of urban spatial resilience has been divided into five dimensions here, urban spatial scale resilience, urban spatial structure resilience, urban spatial form resilience, urban spatial function resilience, and urban spatial network resilience. This study considers the advantages of spatial resilience from landscape ecology and urban resilience from urban studies. As a supplement to existing resilience research, this study provides a new perspective on improving the resilience of urban spaces and reduce urban risks, and guides spatial planning practitioners.

The continuous, intense exploitation of resources under rapid industrialization has made the ecological environment of resource-based cities increasingly vulnerability. Negative impacts of over-exploitation include soil erosion, declines in soil fertility, water pollution, and ground collapse—seriously threatening the survival and development of cities. We used Huaibei City, one of the representative coal resource-based cities, as a case study for measuring ecological vulnerability. We considered the interference effects of human mining activities, based on a typical Pressure-Sensitivity-Resilience (PSR) conceptual framework and constructed an ecological vulnerability index (EVI) system that couples natural and human factors. We then evaluated the EVI using the comprehensive index method. Finally, we combined a Bayesian network model with an entropy difference method, to optimize land use to minimize ecological vulnerability. We found that EVI ranged from 0.25 to 077, with highly vulnerable areas mainly concentrated in the southwest and north of the study area. The subset of {Soi = 1, MSA = 1} was selected as the optimal state subset of key variables for spatial pattern optimization, and primary and secondary optimization areas were mainly concentrated in Xiangshan and Duji Districts. This research will help protect the key ecological functional zones in the region, and provide a reference for policy-making in order to improve the comprehensive carrying capacity of resource-based cities.

The urban emergency shelter is of great significance to disaster prevention and mitigation. In China, the demand is enormous for emergency shelters while their construction generally lags behind the economic and social development, which has resulted in heavy casualties and economic losses. This article considers emergency shelters as a complete system from systemic perspective and also proposes a planning framework for emergency shelter system, including the function, hierarchy, type, scale, layout, standard, and supporting-service system of the shelters. Then, an empirical study applying the framework in GIS platform in the urban emergency shelter planning of Guangzhou city was conducted and highly valued by local experts and citizens as a feasible scheme to guide the construction of emergency shelters, indicating that the framework is an appropriate tool for urban emergency shelter planning.

Flood disasters often have serious impacts on cities. Disaster prevention and mitigation schemes for flood disasters must be based on risk assessment. We constructed an indicator system for flood disaster risk assessment from the aspects of hazard factors, sensitivity to the environment, disaster vulnerability, flood disaster prevention, and resilience. Then we add the precipitation factor as a scenario parameter to the assessment of flood disasters, in order to assess the flood disaster risk under annual average precipitation scenarios, multi-year flood season average precipitation scenarios, and large typhoon precipitation scenarios. Xiamen is one of the cities with more serious flood disasters. We select Xiamen as an example and refer to existing indicators of flood disaster assessment. The results show that: (1) the coefficient of variation of flood disasters in Xiamen under the impact of large-scale typhoon precipitation is large; (2) the drainage and flood control capacity of Xiamen is generally insufficient, and the risk in the old city is high; (3) there are many flood-prone locations in Xiamen. Underpass interchanges, underground spaces, and urban villages have become the new key areas for flood control; and (4) the flood risk in the northern mountainous areas of Xiamen is the highest. Based on the assessment results, we further delineate the urban flood control zones and propose corresponding countermeasures. The study expands the research on flood disaster risk assessment, and also provides reference for relevant cities to deal with flood disasters.

This study explores how emergency shelters can adapt to a multi-hazard environment by geographic information system (GIS) and takes Guangzhou as a case for analysis. The physical suitability of the overall urban resources was first assessed by aiming to select the suitable resources and safe locations for emergency shelters in the context of multiple disasters. Afterward, by analyzing the scale and spatial distribution of affected areas and populations under different types of disaster scenarios, the demand for different kinds of shelters were predicted. Lastly, taking into account the coverage of the affected people, shelters were allocated according to different conditions in the districts. This work will hopefully provide a reference for the construction of emergency shelters and help form emergency operations in order to mitigate the impact of hazards. The issues identified in the study need to be further studied in medium or small-scale cities.

This article aims to examine the implications of improving urban resilience that emerge from Chinese practices for reducing urban disaster risk. First, the concept of urban resilience is discussed, the goal of which is to shape a “culture of resilience” to the largest extent possible in order to reduce urban risk. Urban resilience encompasses broad and diverse areas, and thus can be improved in many ways. This article primarily discusses the planning process. Second, the main focus of the discussion on planning process to improve urban resilience is that of the urban risk management planning of Shenzhen, China. This was the first local urban government project in China to have comprehensively and broadly assessed and reduced urban risk, and it is covered along with the Chinese legislation system and current urban resilience programs in China. The findings show that both the Chinese central government and local governments are paying more and more attention to urban resilience through various legislation and programs, even if they are not using the same terminology as other countries.