From Vulnerability Assessment Toward Resilience Governance: Grant-Supported Knowledge Mapping of Urban Disaster Research in China

Abstract

Urban disaster resilience has become central to risk governance as climate change, compound hazards, and interdependent urban systems intensify pressures on cities. Publication-based reviews describe visible research outputs but reveal less about how research priorities are formulated and funded. This study examines 26 National Natural Science Foundation of China projects initiated during 2014–2024 and retrieved using three deliberately focused keywords: “urban disaster,” “urban resilience,” and “disaster resilience.” Descriptive statistics, text-assisted coding, temporal analysis, knowledge mapping, and a paradigm matrix were applied across six dimensions: hazard types, urban systems, resilience capacities, research methods, spatial scales, and paradigm orientations. Within this selected corpus, funding activity became concentrated after 2019, while research attention broadened from disaster prevention, risk identification, and vulnerability assessment toward resilience assessment, adaptive governance, community capacity, infrastructure networks, and coupled urban systems. Nevertheless, indicator frameworks, spatial evaluation, and model-based measurement remained dominant. Recovery trajectories, compound hazard interactions, social equity, and cross-system governance received comparatively limited attention. These findings indicate an agenda-level reorientation within the selected NSFC-funded corpus, rather than a universal transformation of Chinese urban disaster research. A more mature resilience agenda requires stronger integration of compound risks, recovery processes, equity, and coupled system governance.