The evaluation and obstacle analysis of urban resilience from the multidimensional perspective in Chinese cities

Abstract

Evaluation of urban resilience is essential for ensuring the health and security of cities in China. This paper describes creating a multi-dimensional index system that evaluates urban resilience across economic, social, institutional, ecological, and infrastructure dimensions. The results show that the urban resilience in China slowly increased over the study period and tended to be balanced across the dimensions, although urban environmental resilience and institutional resilience were generally higher, and economic, social and infrastructure resilience were lower. The spatial heterogeneity of urban resilience was significant, and resilience in eastern China was greater than in the central or western regions of the country. The degree of urban resilience corresponded to city size: larger cities showed more resilience than smaller cities. Analysis of factors that were obstacles to resilience showed that these factors changed dynamically from being factors of infrastructure–economy dimensions to factors of society–institution–ecology dimensions. Carrying out the multi-dimensional evaluation of China's urban resilience can identify the weaknesses of resilience in different dimensions, and to enable the factual decision-making and resource allocation of resilient cities at national and sub-dimensional levels.