Is the Coastal Urban System Resilient to Tsunami? A case study of Phuket, Thailand

The purpose of this study is to illustrate resilience of the coastal urban system to tsunami in the context of a case study - Phuket Province in Thailand - and to explore how 2004 tsunami affected-communities and how a wide range of institutions at national to local scales took actions to recover Phuket after 2004 tsunami event. Phuket Island was respected as a case study as it is one of the most memorial cases that were hit by large-scale tsunami in 2004. The study sheds the light on how stakeholders of the city; including urban planners, local residents and local government made their city resilient after tsunami event. In addition, the study identifies the city’s adaptive capacity to absorb impacts of tsunami through “a resilience approach”. With a resilience concept, the study pays attention to indicating the adaptive capacity of an urban system and activities in the Phuket Island to absorb the impacts of tsunami and to recover urban activities from damages to a pre-existing functional state. The study expresses resilience of Phuket by adopting benchmarks from characteristics of ideal community resilience and adapting those benchmarks to the local context. With the scoped benchmarks, the study found that land use policies, economic activities and institutional adaptive capacities were crucial elements contributing to the city resilience. Urban diversity and land use ordinances with a concern on environmental problems would enhance stability of urban system and those could buffer effects of tsunami with support from institutional adaptive capacities.