Lei He

The international community has reached a consensus on promoting the sustainable development of global cities. As an important and irreversible space resource in a city, the development and utilization of urban underground space should follow the principle of sustainability and emphasize scientific and forward-looking planning. At present, most cities have formulated urban underground space master plans. However, due to the lack of an effective evaluation method, the plan quality is uneven, which directly affects the sustainability of underground space development and utilization. This paper proposes a set of sustainability evaluation framework of underground space planning based on relevant planning standards and plan quality evaluation protocol, and makes a comparative analysis of the 40 urban underground space master plans formulated in China from 2004 to 2020. The research found that the planning documents generally reflected the problem of emphasizing design strategies and engineering technology while neglecting implementation and humanistic care; administrative region, population density, land price and other variables closely related to the scarcity of urban space resources are the main factors affecting the quality of urban underground space planning. The conclusions of this paper can aid planners and researchers to identify the problems and influencing factors of underground space planning related to sustainability, and summarize the methods to improve the quality of underground space planning.

Nighttime natural disasters are common, and earthquakes are the most common of these disasters. This study explores the behavior of residents during night evacuations after an earthquake and the factors that influence such behavior. The aim of this study is to improve nighttime disaster relief in residential areas and provide new ideas for renovating and upgrading existing communities. Shanghai is one of the most population-dense cities in China, and it has a fragile built environment. As part of this study, questionnaires were randomly distributed to residents living in Shanghai, and SPSS and AMOS were used to establish a structural equation model to uncover the relationship between factors and the residents’ nighttime evacuation behavior. Some of the results and conclusions were the following: (a) residents had the highest tendency to choose autonomous evacuation and pro-social behavior during night evacuation than at any other time; (b) spatial perception was significantly negatively correlated with residents’ exclusive behavior; (c) herd behavior, autonomous evacuation, and prosocial behavior were significantly positively correlated with social networks. Finally, this study proposes policy and spatial coping strategies for different behaviors during evacuation to enhance the community’s natural disaster prevention capability.

Recently, global natural disasters have occurred frequently and caused serious damage. As an important urban space resource and public service facility, the reasonable planning and layout optimization of shelters is very important to reduce the disaster loss and improve the sustainable development of cities. Based on the review of location theory and models for shelter site selection, this study constructs a bi-level multi-objective location-allocation model, an accessibility, economy, and efficiency (AEE) model, based on sequential decision logic to maximize the economic sustainability and social utility. The model comprehensively considers factors such as the level of decision-making, the utilization efficiency, and capacity constraints of shelters. The gravity model is introduced to simulate the decision-making behavior of evacuees. A calculation example and its solution prove the high practicability and operability of the AEE model in an actual shelter site selection and construction investment, which can achieve the global optimization of evacuation time and the maximization of the use efficiency of the shelters under the financial constraints. It provides a scientific and effective decision-making method for the multi-objective location optimization problem of shelters.

To prevent the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), stringent quarantine measures have been implemented so that healthy people and virus carriers have isolated themselves in the same community owing to the limit capacity of healthcare facilities. With the exponential growth of the infected population, the residential environment is contaminated by fomites from the infected residents and consequently threating the health of susceptible residents. Till now, little has been acknowledged on this indirect transmission route and its role on community transmission. Here we address the impact of self-isolated virus carriers on the residential environment and elucidate the potential transmission pathways via contaminated environment in communities. We urge further investigation on the superspreading cases in communities and hope to arouse the attention to evaluate the potential risk of indirect transmission route as well as the corresponding control measures.

Despite the emphasis on sustainability in post-disaster recovery plans (PDRPs), few studies have been conducted to investigate the information conveyed in disaster recovery plans in terms of sustainability. We aimed to investigate, in terms of sustainability, how post-disaster recovery plans can be improved from historical learning by examining local recovery plans that were developed and adopted after the Wenchuan and Lushan earthquakes, which are two representative post-disaster recovery cases in China. An evaluation protocol for sustainability issues was developed to analyze the recovery plans of the most severely affected counties and towns in Wenchuan (16 samples) and Lushan (7 samples). A comparative analysis was conducted to identify the similarities, differences, and evolution of sustainability considerations in these PDRPs. Semi-structured interviews with key informants were conducted to supplement the evaluation with qualitative data. The results show that the components and concepts of sustainability in PDRPs are conveyed and developed mostly by following the organization’s existing patterns and regulations. In contrast, some components are retained across plans, thereby suggesting a substantial general structure of recovery plans. The underlying logic of this experience transfer across plans was discussed. The findings can help local governments and planners to effectively incorporate sustainability into PDRPs.