Conceptualizing and Measuring Megacity Resilience with an Integrated Approach: The Case of China

Abstract

Megacities play an essential role in social interaction and relationship formation. There is a need for megacity resilience to achieve both safety and sustainability. This paper set out to develop a contextualized conceptual framework and an applied megacity resilience comprehensive index (MRCI). The study provides a multi-model named the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), extending the criteria importance through inter-criteria correlation and entropy (CRITIC-Entropy) weight and introducing the time-ordered weighted averaging (TOWA) to a dynamic situation. The results show that, while the performance of resilience in Nanjing was the highest, the growth ratio of resilience in Zhengzhou was the fastest. In addition, a coupling relationship of pressure, state, and response resilience was verified, and response resilience was more correlated and showed similar trends with the MRCI. The findings indicate that response resilience is still an obstacle factor in the criterion layer in Dalian. Moreover, identified key obstacle factors in the index layer may differ by district or functional zones and need to improve unified and point to area operation. Issues around resilient culture and citizenship were found to be common. Improving public service in Zhengzhou, enhancing support for applied research in Nanjing, and optimizing the ecological industry layout in Dalian were identified as key focuses. This study should be of value for similar megacities in developed or developing countries to improve their resilience.

Resilience Assessment and Influencing Factors of Chinese Megacities

“…The findings indicate that from 2010 to 2021, China's seven megacities' overall resilience increased. The trend of our results is almost identical to that of Yang et al [49], with the difference that their study area only includes Zhengzhou, Nanjing, and Dalian in China. The findings of our study effectively confirm that China's megacities have been strengthening their urban infrastructure, reinforcing institutional safeguards for social and public services, and accelerating the pace of industry transformation in recent years.…”

“…The possible reasons are that each megacity has its unique characteristics and a different focus in the development process. Regional variations exist in the functional positioning and development stages [49]. This leads to differences in the resilience of the seven megacity subsystems over 2010 to 2021.…”