Territorial Spatial Resilience Assessment and Its Optimisation Path: A Case Study of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, China

Along with the rapid development of urbanization and industrialization, the carrying capacity of territorial space has been confronted with a serious crisis. Faced with many uncertain risks and unknown disruptions, it is important to proactively address the uncertainty of future developments in planning and to improve territorial spatial resilience (TSR). Based on the connotation of TSR, we build an assessment framework for TSR containing urban, agricultural and ecological space from three dimensions, including element, structure and function. Using a variety of methods such as the source-sink landscape index, land suitability assessment, and cropland pressure index, we assessed the TSR of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) from 2000 to 2020 and comprehensively analysed its spatial and temporal evolutionary characteristics. Through data analysis, we observe that the urban spatial resilience (RU) decreases and then increases, while the agricultural spatial resilience (RA) and the ecological spatial resilience (RE) show an increasing trend. The spatial clustering in TSR is apparent, and the distribution of hot and cold spots in RA and RE is reversed in the east–west direction. The changes in TSR are influenced by a combination of RU, RA and RE, which show unique geographical characteristics. Based on the average level and overall evolution of TSR, we divided the study area into five type zones and proposed development strategies for each of them.