Dataset Information

Urban resilience: Analyzing the policies of U.S. cities.

ABSTRACT: Resilience has become an important concept in urban governance, yet, the policies that cities actually adopt and implement to build resilience remain largely unknown. The lack of empirical studies on resilience policies hinders our ability to develop theory, ask new questions, and test hypotheses. The goal of this paper is to quantify and compare policies and programs of the 101 largest cities in the U.S. that tangibly affect resilience. We develop a set of resilience policies and then search government websites for evidence of adoption of those policies. To explore patterns of policy adoption, we conduct factor analysis and correlation. We find that resilience does not coalesce around any particular sets of programs. Instead, resilience is a flexible concept, modified to address local context. Substantive groupings of policies do not explain policy adoption. Different dimensions such as funding and level of needed commitment may better explain empirical patterns of policy adoption. Across cities, greater attention must be dedicated to addressing drivers of social vulnerability and climate change impacts. By examining what cities are doing and whether there are underlying patterns to the policies they pursue, we tackle basic empirical questions of how to make sense of the evolving resilience landscape.

SUBMITTER: Woodruff S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8605798 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Urban resilience: Analyzing the policies of U.S. cities.

Woodruff Sierra S Bowman AnnO'M A Hannibal Bryce B Sansom Garett G Portney Kent K

Cities (London, England) 20210519

Resilience has become an important concept in urban governance, yet, the policies that cities actually adopt and implement to build resilience remain largely unknown. The lack of empirical studies on resilience policies hinders our ability to develop theory, ask new questions, and test hypotheses. The goal of this paper is to quantify and compare policies and programs of the 101 largest cities in the U.S. that tangibly affect resilience. We develop a set of resilience policies and then search go ...[more]

PMID: 34803206

Similar Datasets

Project description:Due to the health and economic costs of childhood obesity, coupled with studies suggesting the benefits of comprehensive (dietary, physical activity and behavioral counseling) intervention, the United States Preventive Services Task Force recently recommended childhood screening and intervention for obesity beginning at age six. Using a longitudinal data set consisting of the body mass index of 3164 children up to age 18 and another longitudinal data set containing the body mass index at ages 18 and 40 and the presence or absence of disease (hypertension and diabetes) at age 40 for 747 people, we formulate and numerically solve - separately for boys and girls - a dynamic programming problem for the optimal biennial (i.e., at ages 2, 4, …, 16) obesity screening thresholds. Unlike most screening problem formulations, we take a societal viewpoint, where the state of the system at each age is the population-wide probability density function of the body mass index. Compared to the biennial version of the task force's recommendation, the screening thresholds derived from the dynamic program achieve a relative reduction in disease prevalence of 3% at the same screening (and treatment) cost, or - due to the flatness of the disease vs. screening tradeoff curve - achieves the same disease prevalence at a 28% relative reduction in cost. Compared to the task force's policy, which uses the 95th percentile of body mass index (from cross-sectional growth charts tabulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) as the screening threshold for each age, the dynamic programming policy treats mostly 16 year olds (including many who are not obese) and very few males under 14 years old. While our results suggest that adult hypertension and diabetes are minimized by focusing childhood obesity screening and treatment on older adolescents, the shortcomings in the available data and the narrowness of the medical outcomes considered prevent us from making a recommendation about childhood obesity screening policies.

Project description:Urbanization presents significant challenges to air quality and climate resilience, necessitating pioneering urban design solutions to enhance air circulation and mitigate pollutants. This urgency intensifies in densely populated and rapidly evolving regions like Wuhan, China, where effective strategies are crucial for sustainable development. This study introduces an innovative 3D Urban Form Optimization (3D-UFO) methodology aimed at advancing urban block design configurations to improve urbanization quality. The 3D-UFO approach systematically addresses the multifaceted challenges of climate change and air quality degradation in rapidly urbanizing areas. Integrating GIS-based analysis for comprehensive Land-Use and Land-Cover Change (LULCC) evaluation with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), our approach employs systematic exploration guided by established urban airflow study protocols. Robust metrics-Airspeed-Ratio (ASR) and Average-Age-of-Local-Air (ALA)-quantify the impact of diverse urban block design strategies on air-circulation efficiency and pollutant dispersion. Analysis across various urban scenarios, yielded by the proposed 3D-UFO approach, reveal significant variations in air-circulation efficiency at street and building levels (SBLs). Optimal urban air circulation achieves efficiency levels of 50-70 % when airflow aligns orthogonally across and parallel to streets. Adjusting street-level building heights, especially incorporating taller structures, boosts ventilation efficiency by 20-30 %, which is crucial for improving airflow dynamics in urban settings. Higher Height-to-Width (H/W) ratios (>5.5) yield a 218.5 % increase in ventilation in specific urban layouts. Notably, the synergy of street-aspect-ratio and building-height-ratio adjustments significantly enhance ASR and ALA, providing a quantitative foundation for sustainable urban development. This 3D-UFO methodology, fusing LULCC analysis, CFD simulations, and systematic exploration, emerge as a valuable framework for urban planners and designers. The study offers informed insights into urban sustainability challenges, demonstrating advancements in addressing environmental concerns and improving living conditions within densely populated environments.

Dataset Information

Urban resilience: Analyzing the policies of U.S. cities.

Publications

Urban resilience: Analyzing the policies of U.S. cities.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets