Abstract Body

The effects of the covid-19 pandemic highlight a systemic gap in our knowledge of urban resilience and the urgent need to rethink how we define, measure, and (re)build resilient cities. It is estimated that the global pandemic cost would total $28tn with severe shocks to the urban economy and outputs. Debates on social inequities as a roadblock to urban resilience is coming to the fore in countries like the United States—where about one in five counties are disproportionately black; these areas account for 52% and 58% of COVID-19 cases and deaths. The current research and resilient city models overemphasise the environmental, institutional, and infrastructure side of urban resilience. In contrast, the social and economic structure and processes are neglected, leading to under-preparedness by cities to face extreme events. Whether and how are the resilient city design and assessment frameworks tackling the underlying social disparities? This research presents a comprehensive review of literature on urban resilience assessment tools to measure the extent to which the current knowledge address social inequity to ensure disasters do not disproportionately hit vulnerable communities. We examine whether these tools provide instruments for cities to create an agile urban economic system that can withstand climate crisis or pandemics to ‘bounce back’ to previous equilibrium points or ‘bounce forward’ towards new paths through innovation adaptation. We systematically studied 380 papers from the Scopus database using science mapping techniques VOSviewer and CiteSpace—two widely known software tools for bibliometrics analysis and scientometric visualisation. We employed the Qualitative Content Analysis method to recognise the dimensionality and spectrum of different indicators and assessment tools. Analysis of the urban resilience literature and assessment tools reveals that most of them fall short of appropriately emphasising the core social and human systems as enablers of resilient cities, and further improvements are required. This study argues for assessing resilience against socio-economic risks and articulates the way forward for cities to emphasise social inclusion as much as physical infrastructure. Findings from this study advance knowledge on resilient cities sensitive to changing realities and needs of the disaster-prone communities.