Adaptation and adaptability: Deciphering urban resilience from the evolutionary perspective

Abstract

Given that cities are complex and evolving adaptive systems facing various crises, evolutionary resilience plays a crucial role in fostering urban sustainable development. However, the concept of evolution has been largely overlooked in cognitive assessments of urban resilience, leaving the relationships among the internal elements of urban evolutionary resilience insufficiently understood. To address this research gap, we introduce the evolutionary perspective to redefine urban resilience, and accordingly we develop a conceptual framework and evaluation model that consider two dimensions: adaptation and adaptability. Subsequently, an empirical assessment is conducted using data from 281 Chinese prefecture-level cities spanning the period from 2000 to 2019. Furthermore, we employ the marginal utility function and spatial exploration algorithm to investigate the adaptation-adaptability relationship within urban evolutionary resilience. Our findings reveal that while the overall evolutionary resilience of Chinese cities has increased by 31.91% over the past two decades, the disparities between cities have significantly widened. Additionally, the trade-off or synergetic relationship between urban adaptation and adaptability varies with the stage of urban development. Furthermore, the spatial distribution of urban agglomerations overlaps significantly with the synergy zones of urban adaptation-adaptability relationships. By providing new insights into the comprehensive and systematic evaluation of urban evolutionary resilience, this study holds the potential to inform policy and practice aimed at fostering the development of resilient cities.