The Impact of Digital Transformation on Urban Resilience: Evidence from Chinese Cities

Abstract Rapid urbanization has caused cities to face problems such as traffic congestion, resource scarcity, and environmental pollution. Digital transformation based on technological progress will offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance urban resilience. Therefore, this paper constructs a comprehensive multi-indicator assessment framework with q-rung orthopair 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic sets and utilizes the full consistency method to improve the accuracy of the model. Then, the level of area-wide digital transformation and urban resilience of 158 Chinese cities are assessed and the relationship between them is explored. The results reveal for the first time that cities remain at a relatively low level in digital transformation and urban resilience, with significant imbalances across different resilience dimensions. The results also indicate that digital transformation generally exerts a positive impact on total resilience, specifically by effectively enhancing infrastructure, economic, and institutional resilience, although it does not significantly contribute to social and environmental resilience. This study provides a new insight into the relationship between digitalization and urban resilience, offering valuable reference for advancing high-quality urbanization.