City Resilience to COVID-19 in Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration Based on the Perspective of Human Mobility and Fisher Information Method

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out in early 2020 has severely impacted domestic production and quality of life in Chinese cities. Taking the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration as an example, this study takes Baidu migration data of mobility-within-city and mobility-between-cities as observation variables, adopts Fisher Information and resilience surrogate methods, and quantitatively analyzes the resilience of the urban agglomeration during the pandemic. The results show the changes in mobility-within-city and mobility-between-cities can reflect the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on urban activities and external relations, and can reveal the resilience characteristics of different cities in the urban agglomeration in the face of the pandemic. The results show that: 1. The outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic greatly affected mobility-within-city and mobility-between-cities, the degree of influence and duration of mobility-between-cities are significantly greater than those of mobility-within-city; 2. Yangtze River Delta cities present different types of resilience reflections such as “Stable”, “Smooth W”, “Sharp W”, and “U”, with “Stable” as the dominant type in 2019 and “Smooth W” and “Sharp W” as the dominant types in 2020; 3. In the urban agglomeration, hub cities such as Shanghai and Hangzhou have more confirmed cases, but Nantong and Hangzhou are the most stable cities in terms of mobility-within-city and mobility-between-cities; 4. We should pay attention to improving the resilience of important port cities and transportation hubs.