Urban Resilience During COVID-19 : Examining Public Housing with Older Adult Street Blocks Through Panarchy Theory in Hong Kong

The number of research covering urban resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic is growing, yet the resilience resistance of public housing communities with large populations of older adults remains underexplored through the lens of panarchy theory. "Resilience resistance" is defined as the inherent governance challenges and the effectiveness of government interventions that impede resilience, particularly when system control measures potentially conflict with the built environment's adaptive capabilities. This study examines Hong Kong, characterized by high-density living and a substantial older adult population in public housing, to evaluate how Compulsory Testing Notices influenced the resilience of public housing with significant older adult communities. Through exploring data from the Department of Health in Hong Kong between July 2020 and May 2021 in street block level, we introduce and validate a novel metric - Swift Compulsory Testing Notice implementation - defined as testing notice deployment within 3.6 days of initial case detection. Our findings reveal that public housing street blocks with high concentrations of older adults subjected to standard testing notice implementation experienced higher numbers of confirmed cases, indicating a potential mismatch between policy intervention and environmental adaptation. However, street blocks that received swift testing notice implementation demonstrated enhanced resilience through reduced confirmed cases. These results underscore the critical relationship between implementation timing and policy effectiveness, suggesting that rapid intervention better aligns with the street block's adaptive cycles. The insights offer crucial guidance for pandemic management in older adult urban populations, emphasizing timely policies that support rather than impede built environment adaptation.