Exploring Urban Resilience Thinking with Structural Equation Modeling

Global urban population is expected to increase from 56% to 68% of total population by 2050 (Ritchie & Roser, 2018). This concentration of people and resources exacerbates the impacts of climate disturbances such as flooding and heat waves, to which urban areas are particularly vulnerable, placing residents at elevated risk (UNISDR, 2012). Many disciplines have proposed resilient systems as a solution to disasters (Meerow et al., 2016). Resilience is defined as the ability of a system and its components to learn from, persist through, adjust during, and transform positively after a disturbance. Resilience is an emergent property of systems and is especially well-suited to urban areas. Understanding how the engineered and self-organized elements of urban systems interact both directly and indirectly to affect environmental conditions provides a basis for how to use those elements to enhance positive resilience in urban areas. Structural equation modeling (SEM) offers a multivariate confirmatory analysis method for causal relationships, which can be used to evaluate statistically these diverse interactions. In particular, SEM includes latent variable modeling, which we can use to measure the impact of unobservable variables on a system. Identifying the latent variables of urban systems captures the emerging properties of urban systems. We compiled a dataset of engineered and ecological urban characteristics, social indicators, and temperature across climatically and geographically diverse urban areas in the US. We focused on the influence of urban characteristics on both temperature and ultimately human health in urban systems. We iterated exploratory SEM analyses of each urban system to establish similarities and differences between urban areas. Where similar pathways emerged between variables across urban areas, we included latent variables to represent the relationship. Diverse urban areas that share latent variables may have further underlying connections, allowing policies and practices effective in one type of climate to be extended to another. Observing these relationships in geographically and climatically different cities facilitates identification of social, ecological, and technological patterns and methods that promote resilience of urban communities.