Understanding Infrastructure Resilience, Social Equity, and Their Interrelationships: Exploratory Study Using Social Media Data in Hurricane Michael

Abstract

The 2030 Global Sustainable Development Agenda of the United Nations highlights the importance of understanding the interlinkages of infrastructure, inequality, and resilience. However, there is limited research that studies the complex interrelationships between infrastructure resilience and social equity. To address the gap, this study aims to understand infrastructure resilience, social equity, and their interrelationships in the context of Hurricane Michael through an integrated analysis of social media data, census data, and disaster damage, relief, and recovery data. The results from the study reveal the following key findings. First, in the context of a disaster, Twitter activities have the potential to be used as an important indicator of infrastructure damage and recovery. Second, socially vulnerable populations are generally less active and represented on Twitter. However, under the same disaster threat level, they were shown to be more active on Twitter, which might be due to more significant hardships they experienced in the disaster. Third, communities with different social equity conditions experienced different levels of infrastructure damage and speeds of recovery. Communities with higher percentages of socially vulnerable populations experienced a relatively higher level of damage and required longer time for recovery. This research contributes to the body of knowledge by offering an improved understanding of social equity and infrastructure resilience in the context of Hurricane Michael using a data-driven approach. The findings from this research further reinforce the fundamental understanding that is needed for practitioners in the emergency management and infrastructure development areas to make human-sensitive decisions that facilitate equitable infrastructure resilience.