A proposed gravity model application for community resilience assessments
摘要
Growing hazard exposures and social disparities across U.S. communities have underscored the need for resilience frameworks that capture not only risk and vulnerability but also the spatial and structural processes shaping adaptive capacity. Existing resilience indices typically rely on static indicators that describe community conditions but fail to represent the interactions and accessibility that determine how benefits and risks are distributed. This paper proposes an integrated framework that combines resilience metrics with a production-constrained gravity model, constrained by community networks, to represent how accessibility, connectivity, and spatial structure contribute to resilience outcomes. Within this framework, households serve as origins, and resources as destinations, and networks as the pathways through which benefits and exposures are transferred. By linking gravity-based spatial interaction modeling with resilience domains, the approach enables a dynamic, multi-scalar assessment of resilience as a balance between risks and benefits realized within communities. The framework incorporates population characteristics, infrastructure, and resource distributions to evaluate how accessibility and network connectivity influence vulnerability and adaptation potential. This spatially explicit approach advances the quantification of community resilience by shifting emphasis from static capital-based measures to dynamic processes of interaction, revealing how the organization and connectivity of communities shape their capacity to respond to and recover from disturbance.