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This study explores adaptive capacities in infrastructure preparedness planning from a resilience approach using the bridge between Denmark and Sweden as a case. First, a theoretical framework anchors adaptive capacity in a more general resilience discourse focusing on flexibility and adaptive capacity with emphasis on citizens' ability to interpret information and adjust their behaviour without prior planning and training or instructions. Then, findings from a small qualitative study (n = 45) of the perception of commuters and travellers of the responsibilities and contingencies involved in potential long‐term disruptions of the Øresund Bridge are discussed. The most important suggested recommendation for authorities and infrastructure owners is simply to remind users that an infrastructure is not a given—in other words, to ask travellers whether “they have a Plan B,” thereby prompting citizens to contemplate their dependency on infrastructure and prepare for a disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of risk perception and sense of place on disaster preparedness have been widely reported. However, most studies have only demonstrated weak relationships and it is unknown whether these are applicable to China. This study investigated such relationships in hazard-threatened areas of the Three Gorges Reservoir area in southwestern China. Data were collected from 348 farming households in landslide-prone areas. Binary logistic and Tobit regression models were constructed to determine whether risk perception and sense of place influence landslide preparedness. The results show that: (1) Farming households' awareness of the need to prepare for disasters was relatively low, and disaster preparedness behaviors were mainly based on self-learning. Among the 348 sampled households, 67% exhibited no disaster preparedness behavior, and only 2% adopted four of the five types of disaster preparedness behaviors. About a quarter of farming households consciously learned disaster-related knowledge. (2) Risk perception and sense of place had important influences on disaster preparedness. Respondents who received higher scores on the perception of the probability of a landslide, the threat of a landslide, and the place dependence variables were more likely to adopt a greater number of disaster preparedness behaviors. Respondents with higher scores on the perception of controllability in the case of a landslide were less likely to adopt a greater number of disaster preparedness behaviors. Additionally, individual and household socioeconomic characteristics--education, loss, distance from hazard site, information acquisition channel, and housing material--were all related to household disaster preparedness behavior. This study contributes to the current literature by improving the understanding of the relationships of risk perception and sense of place to disaster preparedness in farming households threatened by geological disasters in southwestern China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent natural or man-made disasters have reminded the government to prepare an efficient evacuation plan in advance to cope with extreme threats, especially for urban area with high density of population. In view of this, many approaches have been proposed from different viewpoints, but limitations of them always exist more or less. Instead of presenting a new approach, we expand an existing staged evacuation algorithm for one exit to solve evacuation problems with multiple exits in this paper. The principle is to assign evacuees to different exits to translate a multi-exit problem to several single-exit problems. The objective is to balance traffic flow among exits and reduce the total clearance time, and thus a series of allocation and optimisation strategies are proposed to approach it. Experiments validate the proposed methods, and a simulation program is also developed to visually examine their performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]