Abstract:

Due to the increasingly serious public health hazards situation, it is important to explore the pattern of spatial differentiation by evaluating community resilience comprehensively. Empirically, it not only helps to figure out the level of public health and the ability of community to deal with the health hazards, but also promotes health equity and community health governance. As for the theoretical contribution, it is innovative to apply community resilience at a micro-scale and public health perspective in China. The study constructs theoretical frameworks of community resilience based on social-ecosystem resilience theory in the basic unit of Guangzhou's communities. A community resilience evaluation model with gray correlation TOPSIS method is established, which contains 23 indicators and 32 variables from five dimensions, including natural environment, built environment, social capital, economic capital and political institution. Conclusions are drawn as follows: Firstly, the community resilience of Guangzhou was identified into five ranks (Excellent, Good, Average, Poor and Fail), and the overall structure turns out to be an olive-shaped pattern, while the community resilience for the urban area is superior to the rural communities. Secondly, the spatial features of community resilience show the trend of gradient decline (from center to edges, from middle-east to west and from south to north). It is indicated that subsystems differ significantly in spatial pattern while communities in all ranks are clustered geographically. There are four types of spatial distribution, which are "double centers type", "core-periphery type", "extensive dispersion with localized concentrations type", and "edge extension type". Finally, the safe area of public health is distributed in the central and southern parts of the city while the dangerous area is in the west, which should be the focus of the defense area of public health security.

Key words: community resilience, public health hazard, community, Guangzhou