Doctoral Dissertation Research: Civic Infrastructures as Determinants of Urban Resilience

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Environmental resilience has been a growing challenge for city administrations around the world. Environmental disasters alone are likely to cost cities billions of dollars and have the potential to plummet an estimated 77 million city dwellers into poverty. Cities are first responders and political actors who can effectively mitigate and adapt to environmental and economic changes. Civic infrastructures, or networks of private, pro-social organizations that include the nonprofit sector and socially responsible corporations, can enable local action. This project asks why city action, or communities' ability to act, differs between locales. Project findings can help policy-makers to identify the ways in which targeted public investments and policies can improve the resilience of communities to natural disasters and other unexpected crises. The project integrates urban sociology and organizational sociology to study city variation in urban resilience. The research design is large-scale and comparative. The first part of the study examines how the relationships between cities through membership in professional associations shape urban resilience strategies. The second part of the study focuses on all cities above 50,000 inhabitants in the United States to study the association between the density and multiplicity of civic infrastructures and city action. Data analytic techniques include econometric fixed effects-models with computational measures based on affiliation networks and structural topic modeling. Semi-structured interviews with urban resilience practitioners worldwide allow for cross-validation of the hypotheses.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.