Urbanization is rapidly increasing, with urban populations expected to grow significantly by 2050, particularly in developing regions. This expansion brings challenges related to chronic stresses and acute shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has underscored the critical role of urban form in a city's capacity to manage public health crises. Researchers are examining how built form, density, and neighborhood structure shape pandemic outcomes. This work adds to the literature and, rather than offering another empirical case study or city-specific design checklist, it bridges the general resilience/morphometrics frameworks with pandemic-specific discussions. We seek to transfer the knowledge of prevalent resilience theories into the context of a pandemic to better understand the relationship between pandemic resilience and urban morphology. In this work, we emphasized the connection between theoretical ideas with quantitative frameworks, offering a cohesive analysis that traces how concepts such system assets, attributes, and performances can be operationalized through morphometric indicators. We synthesize general urban resilience frameworks and morphometric approaches to explicitly map how their concepts and indicators can be adapted to the assessment of pandemic resilience while engaging with the emerging literature on pandemic urbanism and extended urbanization. Our goal is not only to enhance the understanding of urban resilience but also to offer a multi-scalar conceptual map for future empirical work.
Citation: Yue Sun, Ryan Weightman, Anye Shi, Timur Dogan, Samitha Samaranayake. A review of urban resilience frameworks: Transferring knowledge to enhance pandemic resilience[J]. Urban Resilience and Sustainability, 2025, 3(4): 271-292. doi: 10.3934/urs.2025014
Urbanization is rapidly increasing, with urban populations expected to grow significantly by 2050, particularly in developing regions. This expansion brings challenges related to chronic stresses and acute shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which has underscored the critical role of urban form in a city's capacity to manage public health crises. Researchers are examining how built form, density, and neighborhood structure shape pandemic outcomes. This work adds to the literature and, rather than offering another empirical case study or city-specific design checklist, it bridges the general resilience/morphometrics frameworks with pandemic-specific discussions. We seek to transfer the knowledge of prevalent resilience theories into the context of a pandemic to better understand the relationship between pandemic resilience and urban morphology. In this work, we emphasized the connection between theoretical ideas with quantitative frameworks, offering a cohesive analysis that traces how concepts such system assets, attributes, and performances can be operationalized through morphometric indicators. We synthesize general urban resilience frameworks and morphometric approaches to explicitly map how their concepts and indicators can be adapted to the assessment of pandemic resilience while engaging with the emerging literature on pandemic urbanism and extended urbanization. Our goal is not only to enhance the understanding of urban resilience but also to offer a multi-scalar conceptual map for future empirical work.
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Yue Sun, Ryan Weightman, Anye Shi, Timur Dogan, Samitha Samaranayake. A review of urban resilience frameworks: Transferring knowledge to enhance pandemic resilience[J]. Urban Resilience and Sustainability, 2025, 3(4): 271-292. doi: 10.3934/urs.2025014
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