An Exploratory Investigation of Social Vulnerability from the Building Resilience Perspective

Communities and cities are becoming vulnerable due to climate change-induced disasters such as heat waves, flooding, landslides, and droughts. The severity and increased frequency of these extreme events have demanded a resilience plan in the major cities to combat extreme weather events, which requires a systematic community vulnerability assessment. However, the specific impact of extreme events such as high heat waves on community vulnerability has been difficult to measure due to the unpredictability of weather patterns and events. Further, compounding the effects of building and built environment characteristics, the social and behavioral characteristics of households can result in differing levels of vulnerability to extreme temperature events. Even though many studies have discussed social vulnerability based on community demographics, the compounding effect has not been fully explored. When it comes to thermal resilience against extreme weather events, socially vulnerable communities are more likely to be affected by extreme heat due to a lack of thermal-resilient houses. In this research, Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS-2 test) test was used to extend the relationship between building features data and the social vulnerability index of the city of Philadelphia. The outcome of this research strengthens our understanding of how social vulnerability and building resilience are correlated, also in the future to build community prototypes that integrate building features and social vulnerability to simulate community response against extreme weather events.