The governance of urban resilience: a valuation tool and an application to Italian provinces

Abstract Urban resilience is both systemic and dynamic: it depends on interactions among local economic, social, demographic, and health-related conditions and is revealed by how urban systems absorb shocks and adjust over time. This article proposes an operational framework for assessing resilience when municipal data are rich across local units but short in time and uneven across domains, a common setting outside large metropolitan areas. The framework measures resilience through the persistence of shocks and the speed of adjustment of local outcomes. We apply it to Italy using a panel of 7442 municipalities observed over 2014–2023 and grouped into 104 province-specific systems. A province-by-province error-correction model is used to construct model-based indicators of incomplete adjustment following temporary and permanent shocks, as well as the 2020 Covid pulse. The results reveal substantial territorial heterogeneity. Entrepreneurship is the most common channel associated with economic and social adjustment, whereas healthcare provision capacity and age-related fragility are especially informative for social resilience. The Covid pulse confirms that resilience patterns are not reducible to a simple North–South divide.