Informal settlements in the context of COVID-19: Pandemic restrictions and the building of community resilience

Abstract

As the fundamental unit of urban governance, communities are the grassroots for responding to and facing disasters directly, and their resilience to disaster risks has garnered increasing consideration. Despite the large body of community resilience research that now exists, few studies have considered the resilience of informal settlements such as ‘urban villages’. In fact, the high density of building facilities in informal settlements, the diversity and mobility of their populations, their lack of public space and infrastructure and all kinds of managerial problems have become more prominent in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to analyse the characteristics of the migrant populations and healthy living environments of informal settlements, sum up the pandemic prevention measures and their effects, study the community resilience of informal settlements during the COVID-19 pandemic and summarise the strategies to build resilience. Our research results can be utilised to (1) enrich the content of existing community resilience research and promote the resilience of the whole city system in the face of public health events, and (2) provide a scientific basis for comprehensive management of informal settlements and optimise the living environments of migrant populations from the perspective of resilience.