The City in Need

This book fills a major gap in academic research, by exploring ‘urban resilience measures’ and ‘city management issues’ during disruptive disease outbreak events. Based on the overarching concept of ‘resilience thinking’, it addresses critical issues of preparedness, responsiveness and reflectiveness in the event of outbreak, focusing on cities and how they should prepare to combat a variety of adversities and uncertainties caused by outbreaks. This comprehensive book is an essential guide for decision-makers, city authorities, planners, healthcare and public health authorities, and those communities and businesses that face disease outbreak events. It also offers a set of practical measures to support the development of tailor-made strategies in the form of an action plan. These strategies should address outbreak control and containment measures, institutional rearrangements, management of urban systems, and healthiness of the society.   Divided into sixchapters, this book explores important topics of ‘urban resilience’ and ‘city management’ for preparedness action plans and responsiveness planning. Further, it presents a comprehensive urban resilience approach used to support city management in the recent outbreaks in Chinese cities, which can be applied in cities around the globe to strengthen their resilience and maximise the practicality of urban resilience and minimise urban vulnerabilities during disease outbreaks. Highlighting topics such as maintaining societal well-being, community engagement, and multi-sectoral city management enhancement, this book offers a unique combination of research, practices and lessons learned to aid cities in need.

Author Biography

Ali Cheshmehzangi, urbanist/urban designer by profession, is Head of the Department of Architecture and Built Environment and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies (CSET) at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He is also Director of the Urban Innovation Lab, which is pursuing two on-going projects on ‘integrated urban information modeling’ and ‘resilient city strategies’. Ali has four other published books: Identity of Cities and City of Identities; Sustainable Urban Development in the Age of Climate Change; Eco-Development in China (Springer Award 2018); Designing Cooler Cities.