With great cities, come "great" problems. In order to prepare for unpredictable natural disasters and
crises, it is extremely important to find new solutions for urban construction and
development.
In 2013, the Rockefeller
Foundation pioneered the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) initiative to help more
cities become resilient against physical, social, and economic challenges that
are a growing part of the 21st century. Two Chinese cities, Huangshi and Deyang, were selected. Together with famous cities like Paris, New York and London, they
were set to look for and define the future of a resilient city. In this highly impactful
initiative, Nan Li, the main contact for the only 100RC global platform partner in
China, was one of the most prestigious scholars who understood how
Chinese cities could become more resilient.
"Professor Li has a profound
understanding of Urban Resilience. He also broke the boundaries between
Information Technology, Civil Engineering, and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) to
quantify risks for city leaders to make informed decisions – decisions that
will change millions of urban inhabitants' lives," 100RC program manager Alan
Zhuang said highly of Li's contribution.
Li received his bachelor's degree in Construction Management at Tsinghua
University and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at the University of Southern
California. He is currently an associate professor at the Department of
Construction Management and the Director of the Institute of Sustainable
Urbanization at Tsinghua University.
The research group that Li is
leading focuses on the planning, development, and management of resilient
cities and communities. By introducing the "Build Back Better (BBB)" philosophy to the traditional
Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) domain, he proposed a new perspective on "System
of Systems in Trio Spaces" as a transformative analytical framework for urban
and community resilience, and ultimately established a novel scheme for urban
resilience management built on integrated system modeling approaches and big
data analytics.
At the building scale, Li's innovative research achievements include designing
algorithms for localizing and tracking humans at building emergency scenes
based on heterogeneous ambient sensor data fusion and mining, revealing the
underlying mechanism of spatial cognition and wayfinding decision-making of
individual evacuees, and developing a high-fidelity crowed evacuation
simulation and prediction model.
At the urban scale, Li's
contributions include the development of a complex network-based approach for
assessing disaster impacts and performing resilience scenario evolution in
critical urban lifeline systems, and the investigation of complex statistical
physical characteristics of extreme event-induced perturbation of urban human
mobility patterns, and dynamics of such human mobility perturbation over entire
timespan of extreme events.
