Adaptive Amenity Cities—The Regenerative Significance of Consumption Resilience After a Shock Across Dutch Regions

Most conventional dimensions of systemic resilience in a space-economy focus on economic and social regenerative characteristics of a country or region. This chapter proposes the inclusion of a new and important dimension: consumption resilience. Consumption resilience refers to the capacity of consumer behavior to recover or adapt after an economic shock, especially in relation to urban amenities. Consumer behavior typically undergoes significant changes when faced with shocks, making it essential to explore urban consumers’ resilience capacity to return to, or adapt from, a pre-shock situation. This is crucial as it strongly influences many aspects of the national or local economy. Consumption in general, and the use of amenities in particular (e.g., culture, history, entertainment, shopping, or creative classes’ products), is critical for modern cities’ functioning and profiling. However, this phenomenon has thus far been hardly studied from a strategic or operational resilience perspective. In the ‘amenity city,’ the focus is on residents and visitors as key actors who, through their expenditure behavior on urban amenities—and the subsequent impact on the local economy—stimulate cities to become more ‘shock-resistant.‘ Resilience capacity is generally measured by the potential to return to a balanced pre-shock situation characterized by quantitative economic and social performance indicators. In our study, we focus on the role of key city actors from the demand/visitor side by adding to the extant literature on the management of urban amenities the new strategic (and under-studied) concept of ‘consumption resilience,’ which—in contrast to regular resilience analysis—typically covers a relatively short time span. This novel dimension in a spatial or urban context is examined here using a unique set of big data released by Google for research purposes. An illustrative application to a situation of a deep shock—in this case, during the COVID-19 pandemic—will be performed for the urban system in the Netherlands. This study investigates the short-term spatial resilience potential in terms of the consumption trajectory during the COVID-19 pandemic and seeks to formulate policy lessons aimed at enhancing cities’ resilience through better understanding and management of consumption patterns.