Analyzing Urban Space Resilience: Human Mobility Pulses in Auckland's Urban Hotspots through the lens of COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people's daily lives since its outbreak, which has taken the discussion about urban resilience to new heights. Locational data streaming provides opportunities to explore how individuals utilize different urban spaces while their daily routines are disrupted. In this paper, we built on the radical transformation of social behaviours imposed by the government's emergency policies to explore the impacts and recovery of the visiting patterns in urban hotspots under one of the most stringent settings in Auckland, New Zealand. The ‘urban hotspots’ here refer to vibrant urban places that attract both dense (high frequency) and diverse (visitors from different places) visitors. To quantify the impacts, we utilised mobile location data, which consists of 85.53 million data points collected from about 3 million users during 2020. Then, we analysed the signs of returning human activities in urban hotspots before and after the two most stringent COVID-19 lockdowns and evaluated the variation of visiting patterns bi-weekly. Our findings suggest that in addition to essential services (supermarkets and medical institutions), urban parks are notably resilient urban spaces providing significant support for people. This result provides empirical evidence of the added value of urban parks within the urban resilience framework, highlighting the novelty of our methodology that, without presumption, identifies the most resilient urban space as urban green. This also informs planning and rethinking of urban structural strategies as part of the city's recovery from crises and disasters.