Resilience from the socio-spatial transformation and digitalisation of Chinese cities: Introduction to a special issue

Resilience has already become a pivotal topic in planning and urban research. The increasing recognition of urban systems’ capacity to adapt to shocks, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and global financial crisis, necessitates a more nuanced understanding of the concept of ‘urban resilience’. This special issue echoes this imperative by focusing on recent socio-spatial transformations in Chinese cities and the consequential emergence of resilient strategies, particularly those manifested in digital forms, from which to offer new insights into urban resilience. This special issue presents a range of cases analysing how urban resilience is created, negotiated and experienced in response to socio-spatial changes across various scales. These cases range from the macro-level governance shifts, such as the transformation from land/capital-intensive to people-centred urbanisation governance, to micro-level everyday practices, such as the development of platform urbanisms. We further examine the underlying mechanisms of everyday resilience through multiple dimensions, by highlighting political-economic policies at the national level, social capital cultivation at the community level, mutual support at the family level and psychological demands at the individual level.