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.

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.