Does the Intelligent Economy Drive Urban Green Resilience? Mechanisms and Spatial Evidence from China

Urban sustainability depends not only on environmental efficiency but also on cities’ capacity to withstand ecological shocks, maintain essential services, and adapt to long-term resource constraints. This study examines whether the intelligent economy strengthens urban green resilience, a key foundation of sustainable urban development. Using a balanced panel of 273 Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2013 to 2023, we construct entropy-weighted indices and apply two-way fixed-effects, instrumental-variable, mechanism, heterogeneity, and spatial models. A one-standard-deviation increase in the intelligent-economy index is associated with a 0.205-standard-deviation increase in urban green resilience, and the result remains robust across alternative samples, variable treatments, machine-learning estimation, and instrumental-variable specifications. Digital inclusive finance and industrial structure rationalization partially transmit this effect. The gains are greater in cities with stronger human capital, stricter environmental mandates, locations southeast of the Hu Line, and closer access to fiber-optic backbone nodes. Spatially, adjacent-city development generates a negative conditional neighboring effect, whereas the feedback-adjusted indirect effect is positive, with significant diffusion within 200 km and a non-monotonic pattern across distance bands. These findings show that intelligent development supports urban sustainability when technological capacity is converted into inclusive finance, coordinated industrial transformation, effective governance, and regionally shared resilience.