Turning peril into opportunity: Construction and validation of a resilience assessment system for China's coastal megacities

Abstract

Enhancing urban resilience and strengthening risk resistance capacities have emerged as pivotal concerns in the construction and governance of contemporary urban landscapes globally. Given the uniqueness of coastal megacities in terms of geography and population, a more targeted and effective resilience assessment is urgently needed. This investigation develops a comprehensive, multidimensional index system to assess the resilience life cycle of China's coastal megacities. First, we creatively introduce the process perspective of the 4R model of crisis management into urban resilience assessment, revealing the preventive, defensive, recovery, and transformative resilience of China's coastal megacities. Second, we propose a spatio-temporal assessment matrix that integrates four processes of urban resilience and six representative subsystems in coastal megacities: social, economic, ecological, infrastructural, technological, and institutional. Third, we select 59 indicators to construct a three-level assessment index system for China's coastal megacities. This index system is strictly screened and optimized through qualitative and quantitative methods. Fourth, we validate the assessment system using Qingdao's data by calculating an urban resilience index and analyzing trends. We find the most important improvement goals and resilience enhancement suggestions for Qingdao by analyzing the indicator sensitivity. This study contributes to the development of urban resilience theories and identifies weaknesses in different dimensions to strengthen and improve the resilience of coastal megacities.