As the fundamental unit of urban governance, communities are the grassroots for responding to and facing disasters directly, and their resilience to disaster risks has garnered increasing consideration. Despite the large body of community resilience research that now exists, few studies have considered the resilience of informal settlements such as ‘urban villages’. In fact, the high density of building facilities in informal settlements, the diversity and mobility of their populations, their lack of public space and infrastructure and all kinds of managerial problems have become more prominent in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to analyse the characteristics of the migrant populations and healthy living environments of informal settlements, sum up the pandemic prevention measures and their effects, study the community resilience of informal settlements during the COVID-19 pandemic and summarise the strategies to build resilience. Our research results can be utilised to (1) enrich the content of existing community resilience research and promote the resilience of the whole city system in the face of public health events, and (2) provide a scientific basis for comprehensive management of informal settlements and optimise the living environments of migrant populations from the perspective of resilience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought topics of the impact, response and adaptation of cities in emergencies to the forefront. When compared with formal settlements, the problems faced by informal settlements are more prominent. We propose the framework of an actor-network theory, substantiated by an empirical study of three typical informal settlements in Haidian District, Beijing, in which the process, characteristics and internal mechanism of the spatial reconstruction of the informal settlements in response to COVID-19 are closely scrutinised. Human actors such as local governments, community volunteers, landlords, tenants and non-human actors all participated in the response to COVID-19 according to their goal vision and political logic, with the local government as the core driving force, forming an integrated actor network. Rooted in the special locality of informal settlements, the actor network was both hierarchical and flexible, and its inherent dynamism has proven to be efficient during COVID-19, resulting in social adaptation and spatial reconstruction. This study contributes to the cautiously optimistic estimate of similar urban community resilience in terms of global epidemics and enriches the understanding of their interlacing dynamics from the perspective of spatial reconstruction.