Using Resilience to Analyze Changes in an Industrial Community in China

Besides its systematic identification with disasters and hazards, resilience could be a powerful tool for understanding changes in the built environment. This study analyses the development of the workers' residential area in an industrial community (IC) in China after its economic transformation. How can a resilience approach help analyzethe impact of economic changes on the built environment?ICs were self-contained and multifunctional compounds that first emerged in socialist China in the 1950s and wereused to organizesocial production (factory) and collective life (workers' residential areas). Although existing research has explored the possible changes in the built environment of ICs before and after economic transformation, these changes that have either taken place or are still happening have never been quantified. Additionally, the impact of changes in the level of enclosure of workers' residential areas after the factory bankruptcy, a distinctive aspect of the built environment, has seldom been explored. Thus, this study uses a resilience approach to analyzethe impact of changes in the level of enclosure on the built environment of the workers' residential area after the factory bankruptcy by taking the case of Shanxi Knitting Factory (SKF) in Taiyuan, China.This study seeks to use resilience to understand changes in ICs under the background of China's economic transformation. The finding shows that the factory bankruptcy significantly impacts the changes in the built environment of its workers' residential area, as well as affecting the level of enclosure in the built environment. With the disappearance of enclosures after the factory bankruptcy, the workers' residential area of the SKF is gradually shifting from an enclosed, isolated,and self-contained industrial auxiliary facility to an open, diversified,and heterogeneous space. It is gradually integrating into the surrounding urbanneighborhoods.