Resilience planning and emergency management requires policymakers and agency leaders to make difficult decisions regarding which at-risk populations should be given priority in the allocation of limited resources. Our work focuses on identifying, quantifying, and benchmarking these at-risk neighborhoods in New York City by forming a unified, multi-factor index of local and regional resilience capacity: the Resilience to Emergencies and Disasters Index (REDI). The strength of the proposed REDI methodology is the integration of measures of physical, natural, and social infrastructure systems - operationalized through the collection and analysis of spatial, infrastructural, socioeconomic, economic, and environmental datasets - to classify and rank the relative resilience capacity embedded in localized urban systems. The analysis for New York City communities reveals a gradual decrease in resilience capacity as the neighborhood's distance from Lower Manhattan increases, with the lowest resilience capacity observed in the outer boroughs. Hurricane Sandy is used as a test case to validate the REDI scores by measuring the recovery periods for neighborhoods directly impacted by the storm. Using more than 12,000,000 complaints to the City's 311 system, we develop a proxy for neighborhood activity, both pre- and post-event. Hurricane Sandy had a significant and immediate impact on neighborhoods classified as least resilient based on the calculated REDI scores, while the most resilient neighborhoods were shown to better withstand disruption to normal activity.
The REDI Visualization can be found here.
This work was recently published in the Journal of Sustainable Cities & Society.