Philip S. Morrison (p)

This paper focuses on the concept and measurement of context effects which are central to an understanding of local wellbeing. Context is a combination of the objective characteristics of the locality as well as their subjective interpretation by the individual.
I explore the extent to which context effects vary with definitions of wellbeing, the type of individual (their attribute mix) and the characteristics of the locality or place they live in. The results are designed to inform local policy and planning following the passage of the revised (New Zealand) Local Government Act which will allow greater focus on the so-called ‘four wellbeings’ (social, economic, environmental and cultural wellbeing).
While the primary empirical source of testing is the 2018 New Zealand Quality of Life Survey, key propositions are also tested on the more extensive 2016 European Social Survey multilevel data file.
Among the questions motivating this study are whether the wellbeing impacts of wider and deeper social connection are more positive in some localities than others, what place characteristics might account for these differences and the degree to which their impact (association) varies by the type of individual.

Hung-Chih Hung (p), Chih-Hsuan Hung, Li-Jung Wang, Yan-Ting Sung

1. Background
Major portions of metropolitan areas in Asia are highly exposed and vulnerable to devastating climate-related hazards due to rapid urbanization and over-development in hazard-prone areas. By 2020, as United Nations’ warning, many Asian countries will also become ‘super-aged societies’, such as Taiwan. However, local authorities rarely employ resilience approaches to build age-friendly environments and to support disaster risk and land-use management. Therefore, a challenge arisen for decision-makers is how to enhance the resilience of metropolitan areas within the context of age-friendliness and disaster risk reduction. This study aims to propose a novel methodology that encourages stakeholder participation and incorporate age-friendly concept into assessing hazard resilience, examining determinants of resilience as well as communicate to policy-makers in shaping metropolitan land-use policies.
2. Methods and data
Using Taipei Metropolis, Taiwan as a study area, we created a resilience metric called the Indicators of Resilience to Climate-Related Hazards for the Local Elderly (IRCHLE) that can serve as a proxy for communities’ various capacities contributing to resilience and age-friendly environments. Then, this metric combined focus group meeting with multicriteria decision analysis to measure and map resilience. We further incorporated a participatory geographic information system (GIS)-based spatial statistical technique with cluster analysis to examine the extent to which resilience was spatially autocorrelated throughout the metropolitan areas, and explain why the clustering of low resilient areas occurs in specific locations. To illustrate the proposed methodology, the study collected data on the resilience, age-friendly attributes and disaster risk characteristics. The data were offered by the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction, National Land-Use Investigation as well as official census statistics.
3. Results
Integrating cluster with GIS-based spatial statistical analysis, the resilience of Taipei Metropolis was divided into three groups of distribution patterns. This helps identify the core and hotspot areas for policy-makers to improve land-use planning, age-friendliness and promote resilience. Results show that the least resilient areas were mostly distributed in the downtown cores and some historic districts. Moreover, we applied a multivariate regression analysis to examine how the land-use planning and infrastructure factors connected with resilience. Results of regression analysis disclose that the major factors influence resilience, including the levels of exposure to hazards, infrastructure investments and land-use types. Finally, our findings provide stakeholders and policy-makers with better adaptive options to design and synthesize patchworks of planning measures for various types of resilience areas to enhance their age-friendliness and reduce disaster risk.

Grétar Eythórsson (p), Hjalti Jóhannesson

In late 2017 the project BRIDGES – Territories with geographical specificities was granted support from the ESPON program. The final report will be delivered to ESPON in April 2019. https://www.espon.eu/geographical-specifities
It focuses on regions with specific territorial features who have received increasing attention in recent years, most notably in article 174 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). The main purpose of this project is to address the opportunities and challenges of specific types of territories implies that these territories need to be considered in context rather than ‘singled out’. These types of territories constitute the main focus for this project: sparsely populated regions; mountain regions; Islands, including island-states and coastal areas. A central question is: “How can place-based, smart and integrated approaches support the challenges encountered by territories with geographic specificities”?
In the project there are 15 different case study areas in Europe working with different tasks as examples of territories with geographical specificities: 1. Specificity of innovation processes 2. Perspectives and strategies for sustainable tourism 3. Accessibility and transport 4. Social innovation in the provision of SGI 5. Social development 6. Social and economic patterns 7. Residential economy as a component of development strategies 8. Physical environment, natural resources and Energy 9. Biodiversity conservation and sustainable development 10. Energy provision and production 11. Climate change
What we want to present is one of the case studies on one of the topics, which also is a case report in the project: Social Innovation in East Iceland.
The case study is about a creative centre in arts and diverse other activities founded in 2011 in the small village of Stöðvarfjörður where the people had some years before experienced a heavy shock in the economic life due to the closure of a fish factory with a great loss of jobs. The aim of the social innovation project was to contribute to regeneration of the community of Stöðvarfjörður and to help with maintaining economic and social activity. We describe the background of the centre, the organisation and the running of this centre. Further we evaluate the estimated impact of the centre as well as future prospects. This is done with collection of data and several interviews with stakeholders and owners.

Andrey Polyachenko (p)

Regional resilience is a type of resilience related to the economy of regions and cities. Usually, it is calculated for particular economic crises. After a consideration of different ways to estimate it, we decided to use Ron Martin’s method as it does not require complex calculations and gives quantitative results.
In this work we calculate the regional resilience of major Russian Arctic cities to catastrophic economic crisis caused by the USSR collapse. This region is especially vulnerable as it has low population density, specialization on raw materials production and strongly depends on federal aid, this is why the strongest recession here occurred in 1990s. Russian Arctic is unique because it has several relatively big cities above the Arctic Circle (Murmansk, Norilsk). Moreover, the Arctic cities have a very different dynamics: some cities managed to grow, while several others fell by four times.
The main idea of the research is to associate the regional resilience with several factors: size, capital status, remoteness, quality and type of infrastructure, economic diversification, type of natural resources in basic sector and phase of a resource cycle. All this factors are tested by correlative analysis. Several of them are “traditional” resilience factors like size, capital status and economic diversification, being crucial for densely-populated areas. In contrast, other variables are added by us according to special characteristics of Arctic territory (infrastructure, type of basic resource). This factors indicate Arctic special vulnerability. Then we make a typology of the cities according to their resilience.
This study has several practical applications. Firstly, it helps to predict the vulnerability of some particular cities, which is useful in turbulent Arctic region. Secondly, after more elaborated investigation some political proposals for local and regional stakeholders can be made.

The reported study was funded by RFBR according to the research project № 18-05-60088 "Urban Arctic resilience in the context of climate change and socio-economic transformations"