Macro–micro urban resilience analysis in emergency: insights from Chinese eight major urban agglomeration

Urban agglomeration, a product of advanced urbanization and industrial transformation, plays a critical role in national spatial and economic systems. Urban agglomeration resilience remains underexplored in existing literature, particularly regarding how multi-scale interactions between macro-level network structures and micro-level public perceptions jointly shape regional adaptive capacities during crises. To address this gap, this study proposes a novel dual-perspective framework integrating population mobility network analysis (macro) and public sentiment analytics (micro) to evaluate the resilience of eight major Chinese urban agglomerations during the COVID-19 epidemic. The results indicate the agglomerations robust intercity connectivity and stable structural networks, such as polycentricity structures or breaking the inter-provincial effect, exhibit higher resilience. Based on the experimental results, we propose multi-scale development strategies. It is argued that the development of urban agglomerations should focus on breaking down urban barriers, enhancing network hierarchies and complexity, and mitigate long-term urban vulnerabilities of unexpected events.