Synergizing urban smartness and resilience: an evaluation framework for coupling coordination and influencing factors

Synergizing urban smartness and resilience is central to sustainable urban development, yet most studies examine these agendas in isolation. This study develops an integrated evaluation framework to assess their coordinated development from a social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) perspective. The framework combines CRITIC-TOPSIS for composite index construction, a coupling coordination model to quantify coordination, and obstacle diagnosis to identify key constraints. Applying it to panel data from 35 large-scale Chinese cities (2011–2023) yields four main conclusions: (1) both smartness and resilience improved, but resilience generally lagged behind smartness, producing a prevalent “resilience lag” pattern; (2) despite this gap, their trajectories were broadly synchronized; (3) coupling coordination increased with city scale, while the inter-scale gap narrowed as pressures intensified in supercities; and (4) urban scale fundamentally shaped coordination drivers and barriers, making one-size-fits-all strategies ineffective. Accordingly, supercities should rebalance technological expansion with ecological and social capacities through polycentric planning and integrated urban operation platforms; megacities should co-develop education infrastructure and green amenities to attract talent; and large cities should anchor smart industrialization in eco-oriented clusters. Overall, this study contributes a SETS-informed and empirically operational framework and provides actionable evidence for scale-sensitive policies to advance coordinated smart and resilient urban development.