This page adapts an academic project for the portfolio. It summarizes the work and its methods; the original document is not published here.

Project overview

This project designs a community resilience assessment for Wichita, Kansas, with Sedgwick County evidence included where emergency management, healthcare, infrastructure, and environmental systems cross municipal boundaries.

The central question is:

How should Wichita’s resilience be assessed through the interaction of hazard exposure, social and spatial vulnerability, and community capacity?

The project combines a review of existing public evidence with a proposed research design. Its purpose is to establish how to evaluate resilience, not to claim that a citywide assessment, original GIS analysis, or resident research has already been completed.

Why Wichita?

Wichita presents several overlapping resilience challenges. The city faces severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, flooding, and extreme heat. These hazards can affect residents and critical economic assets at the same time. The April 14, 2012 tornado event, for example, affected residential areas and aerospace facilities.

The paper also considers the September 2026 water-service disruption and the transition to a replacement treatment plant, which raise questions about infrastructure reliability, redundancy, and the capacity of public institutions to adapt after disruptions.

Wichita’s aerospace and manufacturing base adds another dimension: it contributes skilled labor and economic resources while potentially increasing exposure to industry-specific shocks. Meanwhile, aggregate population statistics cannot reveal whether households across different neighborhoods experience similar risks or access to emergency resources.

These intersecting factors make Wichita useful for examining resilience as more than the presence or absence of physical hazards.

Assessment dimensions

  • Hazard exposure: Severe weather, flooding, extreme heat, and potentially exposed facilities.
  • Social and spatial vulnerability: Household resources, housing, age, disability, vehicle access, insurance, and the geographic distribution of vulnerability.
  • Infrastructure and institutional capacity: Water reliability, emergency warnings, healthcare access, public infrastructure, and agency coordination.
  • Economic and social capacity: Manufacturing concentration, community networks, public trust, knowledge transfer, and organizational learning.

The framework draws on Masterson et al. (2014) to understand disaster vulnerability and inclusive planning, and Wilson (2012) to consider social learning, community resources, and the fit between policy and local conditions.

What the preliminary evidence suggests

The literature and public records reviewed in the original assessment plan raise several areas for closer investigation, rather than a definitive resilience ranking:

  • Water infrastructure: A recent service interruption makes reliability, contingency procedures, replacement capacity, and institutional learning relevant assessment questions.
  • Uneven neighborhood conditions: Differences in local demographic and housing indicators justify block-group analysis rather than relying on citywide averages. Race, poverty, housing, and disability should be examined as distinct measures, not interchangeable proxies.
  • Hazard and healthcare access: Tornadoes, flooding, and heat may have disproportionate impacts where transportation options, accessible facilities, or protective resources are limited.
  • Economic concentration: Aviation and manufacturing can contribute economic resilience while also exposing employment and major assets to a narrower set of disruptions.
  • Social and institutional capacity: Resident confidence, civic connections, hazard communication, and lessons retained from earlier events may shape preparedness and recovery.

These are hypotheses and assessment priorities. The project does not establish which neighborhoods are most at risk or quantify the effectiveness of current interventions.

Proposed research design

1. Assemble public and administrative evidence

The plan calls for combining U.S. Census neighborhood data, National Weather Service and NOAA hazard records, FEMA and local GIS layers, city and county infrastructure records, and aggregate healthcare and workforce information.

Indicators would include income, poverty, housing conditions, age, disability, vehicle access, insurance, hazard frequency, and the accessibility of emergency services. Where possible, comparisons would use small geographic units rather than citywide averages.

2. Develop a GIS-based vulnerability analysis

A proposed GIS workflow would combine three spatial layers:

  1. Exposure: flood zones, heat patterns, and historical severe-weather information;
  2. Vulnerability: household resources, mobility, housing, age, and accessibility needs;
  3. Capacity: emergency and healthcare facilities, transportation links, cooling resources, and neighborhood organizations.

The goal would be to identify locations where high exposure, elevated vulnerability, and limited capacity overlap. No original map or hotspot result is represented as completed work here.

3. Add resident and stakeholder experience

Administrative records cannot fully capture preparedness, trust, warning comprehension, lived experience, or informal support networks.

The proposed qualitative component therefore includes resident surveys, focus groups, stakeholder interviews, and neighborhood meetings. Targeted recruitment and oversampling would help avoid losing the experiences of smaller or potentially underserved populations in citywide averages.

4. Triangulate and test institutional learning

The analysis would compare GIS patterns, administrative records, surveys, and interviews. Agreement across sources would support greater confidence; disagreement would flag findings for further investigation.

A separate institutional review would examine after-action learning, communication accessibility, coordination, knowledge retention, and whether public programs align with locally observed needs.

What the work demonstrates

This project is an example of public-sector assessment design and evidence synthesis. It demonstrates the ability to:

  • translate a community-level problem into a structured, researchable question;
  • distinguish exposure, vulnerability, and available capacity;
  • identify public data sources and measurable indicators;
  • design a mixed-methods approach integrating spatial, quantitative, and qualitative evidence;
  • account for participation, representation, and data limitations; and
  • connect assessment findings to possible improvements in emergency planning and service delivery.

Limits and next steps

The project is an assessment plan supported by preliminary secondary research, not a completed municipal resilience audit. No original surveys, interviews, stakeholder engagement, GIS mapping, or field validation were performed for the assignment.

A next research phase would need to establish an explicit prioritization method, validate proposed vulnerability patterns, test the accessibility of critical resources, and develop an evidence-supported preliminary judgment about which risks warrant the earliest policy attention.

Selected evidence base

Selected materials informing the original plan include:

Portfolio context

Adapted from an October 2026 assessment plan developed for PAF 560 – Community Resilience at Arizona State University. The portfolio version presents the research question, reviewed evidence, proposed method, and limitations; the full class submission and grading materials are not published.