Critical Factors for the Resilience of Complex Urban Public Spaces

Qualified with functions of matter, culture, and economy, urban public spaces mirror the complexities of societies. Over the last couple of decades, urban areas in Chinese context have been engaged in increasing initiatives and practices with views to intensively utilize land resources and facilitate people's life. Echoing with these, the complex urban public spaces (CUPSs) with multi-layer structure integrated in three-dimensional space have been constructed in many cities and resulted in crowded people in each layer. The CUPSs are subjected to various risks due to complex structure and crowded people. Gaining resilience and enhancing risk resistance ability of CUPSs are indispensable but indeed difficult as it is determined by lots of influencing factors. In response, this paper intends to conduct a research on the exploration of critical factors for the resilience of CUPSs. Content analysis, expert investigation, and analytic hierarchy process will be adopted for the identification, analysis, and contribution evaluation of the critical factors. Prospectively, the critical factors in a sound taxonomy to break down the resilience will be obtained. The main findings of this research could provide useful and informal references for governors and policy makers to enhance the resilience of CUPSs.