Alan Kwok

Citation

Thesis Title
Assessing social resilience to disasters at the neighbourhood level: Co-producing a resilience assessment framework

Read article at Massey Research Online:

Disasters of the past decade have prompted the adoption of disaster resilience policies across communities, cities, and nations. As policies are translated into local actions, there has been a proliferation of resilience assessment tools that evaluate resilience progress. While communities are at the frontline in responding to disasters, few assessment tools have been developed with input from community members. Questions remain about whether existing tools reflect local resilience priorities. Mr Kwok sought to develop resilience assessment measures of the social environment, or social resilience, for neighbourhoods in Wellington, New Zealand and San Francisco, USA, through integrating scientific and local knowledge. He found that various stakeholder groups including researchers, emergency practitioners, policymakers, and neighbourhood stakeholders, shared similar views on the key characteristics of social resilience. These shared characteristics demonstrate the potential universality of social resilience measurements at the neighbourhood level that could inform new models for measuring disaster resilience

Supervisors
Professor David Johnston
Dr Julia Becker
Associate Professor Emma Hudson-Doyle