Exploring neighborhood‐level resilience to flooding: Why the context and scale matter

Abstract

This article explores the role of contextual neighborhood‐level considerations in community resilience planning in coastal urban locations. A comparative case study analysis was conducted in three different locations in the City of Hampton, Virginia, that all share a common challenge of coastal flooding but have distinctly different neighborhood‐level circumstances that shape their flood impacts and resilience building options. The research approach utilizes a co‐production of knowledge and descriptive statistics to identify the overall flood risk and socioeconomic attributes of each locality that may influence broader citywide resilience investments within the realm of three overarching options: protection, accommodation, and relocation. It then applies a geospatial network analysis to determine which study neighborhoods will have significantly reduced access to critical facilities such as emergency services, medical facilities, and schools due to accelerated sea level rise as one of the key coastal hazards in this low‐lying region. The results show that each case study location has its own unique contextual circumstances that define its preferences for different resilience strategies regardless of the actual flood risk. The results also highlight the importance of holistic assessment of granular conditions that play a critical role in prioritization of resource allocation and interventions in coastal municipalities.

Review of Urban Flood Resilience: Insights from Scientometric and Systematic Analysis

“…In addition to the integrated assessment, there are also the development of economically targeted property flood-resilience in flood-risk management (targeted PFR) models, the index-based spatialized urban flood resilience index (S-FRESI) models [ 70 ], and capability maturity models (CMM) for companies [ 117 ]. When using indicator models for evaluation, research has been conducted from a variety of perspectives, including disaster-risk management [ 118 ], community-resilience assessment in specific regions [ 109 , 119 , 120 ] and urban land-ecosystem-resilience evaluation [ 121 , 122 ]. Depending on the topic and perspective, these models can be developed and applied to flood resilience studies in different ways.…”