Zeynep Elburz (p), karima kourtit , peter nijkamp

Karima Kourtit

The concept of resilience which has been first introduced in the field of ecology, has been studied in many different disciplinary fields. In particular, because of global concerns on major threats such as disasters, economic crises, diseases, and other threats to human development, the notion of resilience has –despite adversity- become popular. Even though resilience concept is not new concept it still triggers the attention from many fields at different scale levels, both living and nonliving, such as an economy, a microorganism or a child, so as to understand the process of anticipating, adapting and recovering in the face of major threats. The concept itself is not easy to operationalize in practice. However, having various types of definitions from various fields and studies leads to a very complex framework to measure and analyze the resilience concept. That is why it is crucial to understand the concept with all dimensions, determinants and levels from a new and broader framework for both natural and social sciences. In this paper, we look into the urban resilience concept from many perspectives in order to define and measure it in an appropriate way. The aim of this paper is to present a new framework on urban economic resilience with a new dimension which is called spatiallity and indicators which are based on urban forms, by taking into account the advantages and disadvantages of existing urban resilience definitions in the literature.

Georgiana Avram (p)

Karima Kourtit

Over the past half-century, children mobility has changed from independently walking to being driven or accompanied by adults, a fact that turned cars into becoming one of the enemies of the child friendly city (CFC). Cluj-Napoca, the second largest city of Romania, is confronted with serious traffic problems, as the number of cars is 322 vehicles/1.000 citizens compared to 261 vehicles/1.000 citizens at national level, and only from 2008 to 2018, 5.601 roads accidents took place, causing 511 children pedestrian victims. Transport in cities has various pervasive effects (traffic congestion, air and sound pollution) which have been extensively studied. When examining traffic congestion, researchers usually attempt to focus on the negative effect of people commuting to work, but fail to consider/take into account the effect that parents taking their children to school has. So, the aim of this research is to identify which is the parents’ perception about children’s individual school travel.

John Östh (p), Karima Kourtit , Peter Nijkamp

Karima Kourtit

Measuring regional resilience is of great importance both for the understanding of the effects of a shock and for preventing or limiting the effects of the shock. The regional statistics used in studies of regional resilience are often aggregated to larger administrative regions by statistical agencies, which means that variations in resilience on any scale ranging from neighbourhoods to labour-market regional levels are difficult or impossible to estimate. In our study we make use of the Swedish longitudinal register data that contains disaggregate statistics on individual level and with variables describing sociodemographic, economic and work-place related characteristics. Instead of using regional economic resilience statistics to study the rate of migration from less affluent areas, we make use of multi-scale bespoke neighbourhood methods for studying at which spatial scale-level the explanatory power is doing the best job in explaining migration from the studied regions.
The preliminary results indicate that different components used to measure regional economic resilience, respond more or less well to different spatial scales, but the explanatory power is in all tested variables significantly better than traditional regional aggregate levels. The results from this study indicate that regional economic resilience acts at different spatial scales and that improved resilience measures would benefit from using multiple-scale approaches.