The Resilience of Smart Cities: A System Analysis of Seven Megacities in China

The construction of smart cities is regarded as an effective means to address the urban diseases. However, whether the construction of smart cities can enhance urban resilience remains to be further explored. This paper builds a smart city resilience evaluation index system, including economic, governance, living, transportation, civil, and environmental resilience. Seven megacities in China are employed to conduct empirical analysis with the built index. The results indicate that the resilience level of the seven megacities is moderately high and showing an upward trend, with Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou exhibiting high resilience and good development, progressing from moderately resilient cities to strongly resilient ones. Then, Tianjin and Chengdu have relatively low resilience scores, but both are gradually transforming from low-resilience cities to moderately resilient ones. Further, the obstacle degree model shows that economic resilience and social resilience have the greatest impact on the resilience of smart cities. This paper provides a new perspective related to smart cities for subsequent urban resilience evaluation research.