Are Urban Hotspots to Avoid or to Embrace? Determining the Resilience of Auckland City's Urban Hotspots Under Lockdown Constraints

The COVID-19 pandemic has unprecedentedly affected the daily routines of people everywhere. Mass media channels and data-streaming techniques have assisted in tracking the spread and the trajectory of infection, providing many rich datasets that record human mobility patterns. Such sources can provide valuable insights about how people cope when their daily lives are heavily disrupted and social activities are prohibited. In this article, we take Auckland City, the largest city in New Zealand, as a case study and utilize mobile location data collected in 2020 to explore the impacts on urban hotspots due to the radical transformation of social behaviours imposed by the government’s emergency policy. ‘Urban hotspots’ in this article are defined as vibrant urban spaces that attract both dense (high frequency) and diverse (visitors from various places) visitors. We first construct human-geographical networks of individual users and then analyse human mobility patterns with regard to visitor density and diversity before and after two COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. Our findings suggest that urban parks could be perceived as resilient urban infrastructures that offer crucial support for people during a pandemic. The findings could inform a rethinking of urban space planning strategies as part of the city’s post-COVID-19 recovery.