The spatio-temporal dynamics of urban resilience in China's capital cities

Urban resilience refers to the resilience of a city after external shocks and its ability to prevent, respond and recover from extreme disasters. In 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs) made urban resilience one of the global sustainable development goals. Additional information regarding urban resilience can have a positive effect on the transformation toward a more sustainable city. For China, the development and research of urban resilience is still in its infancy, and there is insufficient experience in implementing key tasks and project management. This research studies 30 of China's provincial capital cities, constructs an evaluation framework and system for urban resilience, measures the resilience of Chinese capital cities from 1998 to 2017, and explores their temporal and spatial evolution based on econometric models. The results show that (1) the gap in the level of resilience between provincial capital cities have been increasing over time; (2) the gap in the level of provincial capital cities in Northeast, Southwest, Northwest and Yangtze River Delta regions in China show significant “convergence”; and (3) cities located in economically developed areas such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, namely, Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Guangzhou, exhibit higher resilience levels. In contrast, Lanzhou and Yinchuan in the northwest and Harbin and Changchun in the northeast show lower levels of resilience. Finally, relevant policy recommendations are proposed at the national, regional and city levels.