Evaluating the Contribution of Underground Space to Urban Resilience in Key Urban Areas: A Case Study in Shanghai

Urban underground space development is widely accepted as a contribution to urban resilience. An in-depth understanding of the composition and influencing factors of this contribution can help to better exploit the resilience of urban underground space. Currently, research on underground space resilience is mostly at the macro level (city scale) but lacks micro level (district scale) exploration. To bridge this gap, this study constructs an evaluation framework to measure the contribution of underground space in key urban areas to urban resilience enhancement. Under this framework, the evaluation index system is established from a systematic perspective and the relative importance of indexes is estimated by entropy weight method. The framework is then applied to evaluate representative cases in Shanghai, i.e., cases in sub-centers characterized with a multitude of metro-led underground space and underground complexes. The results show that underground space has multi-dimensional contributions to urban resilience at the micro level, with providing reachability to exits, protection space enhancement, and environmental benefit enhancement being the top three positive contributors, while underground space vulnerability is a non-negligible negative factor. The findings can provide guidance on urban underground space development toward a more resilient direction.