During the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government has applied national and regional lockdowns that have greatly reduced the ability to travel for daily activities such as work or shopping. The changes in behaviour resulting from these restrictions have had spatial implications by creating a shift in the urban system, and particularly the urban retail system. High streets located near offices have seen great reductions in footfall whereas those located near residential hubs were most resilient. During lockdown, high accessibility of the area by public transport and high median household income of the catchment area both led to lower footfall. However, high ratios of retail, residential and leisure land uses increased footfall, as well as distance to central London and high residential density within the high street catchment. Our findings show that, to create resilient high street, there should be a greater push for residential uses on and around the high street, and a preservation or increase of retail units, as well as a decrease in the centralisation of the workplace. Whilst there are certainly dangers to the deregulation of the planning system, the adaptability that it facilitates for land use change may allow for the creation of such resilient high street. Findings also encourage policies that seek to decentralise urban systems, such as the 15-minute city model.

Deeply threatened by natural disasters, especially earthquake, typhoon and flooding; Taiwan has been seeking an effective approach to enhance the urban adaptive capacity to hazards. Urban renewal, which was seen as a tool to stimulate urban economic development as well as promote planned redevelopment and utilisation of land, has been transferred to a solution to mitigate the disaster risk from the view of the authority. Therefore, this study aims to examine the effect of urban renewal programmes on urban resilience to natural disasters. A disaster resilience framework was built through literature review first, and then a comprehensive review of the urban renewal programme of Taipei City, including laws, regulations, government’s policies and research reports were conducted. Also, interviews among different actors engaging in the process of urban renewal and disaster prevention were carried out to analyse how urban renewal programme has affected the urban resilience, both on the physical and social environment. The result suggests that urban renewal programme may increase the physical resilience to disaster through improving build environment and natural environment capacity; however, in terms of improving the social adaptive capacity, the effect of urban renewal programme is quite limited. Since the concept of disaster resilience, especially social resilience, have not been involved in the urban renewal relevant policy and plan-making process in the first place, the linkage between urban renewal and building disaster-resilient city is fragmentary. Furthermore, despite similar goals, the different departments in the municipality have worked in parallel, which results in the inefficiency of improving resilience through urban renewal approach.

This major research project explores the paradigm shift in the flood management discourse from flood mitigation to flood resilience through design. It explores how urban design could be used as a tool to increase flood resilience of low-income urban neighbourhoods in the Global South nations. The project shows that urban design is a bedrock for holistic flood management that could simultaneously help low-income communities achieve a more sustainable livelihood.

A description of the work (Abstract): Since the beginning of the pandemic many flaws in the way cities around the world function were made visible and the FAO identified the urban food provisioning system as one of these (Khim, 2020). COVID-19 is far from being the first biological hazard but in current times it is the first that has gravely affected all stages of the food system including, production, processing, packaging, distribution, retail, and consumption. More frequent climatic hazards have been studied and addressed through disaster risk reduction usually at the level of agricultural production such as unpredictable and extreme weather leading to failed harvests. Therefore, this paper combines the fields of disaster risk reduction and food system planning to build back better after the COVID-19 biological hazard in developing cities such as Lima, Peru and more particularly in the middle-low to low-income district of Villa Maria del Triunfo. This combination is based on the idea that disasters can be defined as the impact of a hazard on a human system which can be a food system and that literature in both fields mention resilience as a key concept to build back better. Throughout the case study assessing pre-disposing disaster risk to COVID-19 in the food system shed light on the unequal exposure, vulnerability, and capacity to act to disaster risk in Lima. It also created space to look at international examples of post-disaster recovery strategies in food systems of other cities and the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s most recent resilience framework called the City-Region Food system. The strategies suggested for the case of Villa Maria del Triunfo are transferable to cities that have similar issues but on the other hand they are also largely dependent on the will of cities and their actors to act on these matters. Thus, this paper can be seen as advocating for the implementation of food systems planning in disaster risk reduction as an important step for urban development.