Natural disasters are becoming increasingly frequent and greater in magnitude. With aging infrastructure and fragmented urban systems, urban resilience should be a top priority. Mobility is a key component of resilience as it facilitates evacuation of individuals from impacted areas and delivery of supplies and assistance where needed. There is ample evidence that disasters trigger helping behaviors, and recent developments in crowdsourcing technologies provide additional support to this flexible and adaptive volunteered response. To date, sharing economy services have played a role in 30 disasters across the United States, but strategies to electively integrate these platforms and understanding of evacuation decision-making remain underdeveloped.

METHOD To better understand how crowdsourcing platforms may enhance resilience, we study both the demand for and supply of crowdsourced resources for disaster response through behavioral experiments and large-scale operational data capturing ridesourcing usage during no-notice mobility disruptions. Additionally, we are examining the elects of social influence on the formation of sharing networks to facilitate emergent social capital for improved resilience.

INSIGHTS Our findings indicate that despite interest in on-demand services for disaster response, there remain tensions between the improved responsiveness that crowdsourced systems offer and the additional risks and liabilities that they present. These tensions call for sociotechnical evidence-based actionable solutions to better leverage this innovative opportunity for increased resilience.

ACTION Acknowledging safety concerns and building on the existing knowledge of the role of social capital in disaster resilience, a promising solution is for community-based organizations to take the lead on partnering with private sharing companies, developing community emergency response teams, preregistering and training volunteers, sponsoring community cohesion- strengthening activities, rewarding sharing behaviors, and maintaining communication on best sharing practices and ways to connect shared-resource users and providers. These community-based solutions could enhance the benefits of crowdsourcing technologies while reducing the uncertainties inherent in these on-demand platforms.