Doctoral Dissertation Research: Civic Infrastructures as Determinants of Urban Resilience

环境复原力是世界各地城市管理部门面临的一个日益严峻的挑战。仅环境灾害就可能使城市损失数十亿美元，并有可能使估计7 700万城市居民陷入贫困。城市是第一反应者和政治行动者，能够有效地缓解和适应环境和经济变化。公民基础设施，或包括非营利部门和对社会负责的公司在内的私人亲社会组织网络，可以使地方行动成为可能。这个项目探讨了为什么城市行动或社区行动能力在不同地区之间存在差异。 项目结果可以帮助决策者确定有针对性的公共投资和政策如何能够提高社区对自然灾害和其他意外危机的复原力。该项目整合了城市社会学和组织社会学，以研究城市弹性的城市差异。研究设计是大规模的比较研究。研究的第一部分探讨了城市之间的关系如何通过专业协会的成员塑造城市的韧性战略。研究的第二部分重点关注美国所有超过50，000居民的城市，研究城市基础设施的密度和多样性与城市行动之间的关联。 数据分析技术包括计量经济学的固定效应模型，基于联系网络和结构主题建模的计算措施。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.