Resilience of Urban Network Structure in China: The Perspective of Disruption

Abstract

In light of the long-term pressure and short-term impact of economic and technological globalization, regional and urban resilience has become an important issue in research. As a new organizational form of regional urban systems, the resilience of urban networks generated by flow space has emerged as a popular subject of research. By gathering 2017 data from the Baidu search index, the Tencent location service, and social statistics, this study constructs information, transportation, and economic networks among 344 cities in China to analyze the spatial patterns of urban networks and explore their structural characteristics from the perspectives of hierarchy and assortativity. Transmissibility and diversity were used to represent the resilience of the network structure in interruption scenarios (node failure and maximum load attack). The results show the following: The information, transportation, and economic networks of cities at the prefecture level and higher in China exhibit a dense pattern of spatial distribution in the east and a sparse pattern in the west; however, there are significant differences in terms of hierarchy and assortativity. The order of resilience of network transmissibility and diversity from strong to weak was information, economic, transportation. Transmissibility and diversity had nearly identical scores in response to the interruption of urban nodes. Moreover, a highly heterogeneous network was more likely to cause shocks to the network structure, owing to its cross-regional urban links in case of disturbance. We identified 12 dominant nodes and 93 vulnerable nodes that can help accurately determine the impetus behind network structure resilience. The capacity of regions for resistance and recovery can be improved by strengthening the construction of emergency systems and risk prevention mechanisms.

Towards innovation resilience through urban networks of co-invention: A case study of cities in China

“…The main contribution of this article is to establish an analytical framework for exploring the innovative resilience of urban networks, which integrates systematic and nodal thinking on resilience research in network science (Wang et al, 2020) with the potential and connectivity concepts of resilience research in urban science (Philip Cooke et al, 2012), as well as the hierarchical and assortativity characteristics of recent research on urban network resilience (Wei and Pan, 2021). This framework contributes to a comprehensive perception of stability and adaptability issues in the development of innovation (characterized by uncertainty and sensitivity) and strives to promote the expanded application of the concept of resilience in the field of innovation.…”

“…In theory, the power exponent of a scale-free network is usually between 2 and 3 (Barabási and Albert, 1999;Barabasi et al, 2000). The slope |a| of the curve is 0.8258, which is relatively low compared with the hierarchical coefficient of the resilience of information networks and economic networks studied by Wei and Pan (2021), respectively, 1.229 and 1.727, and the result of the resilient network studied by Crespo et al (2013) which was 1.063. The low coefficient indicates that the innovation network may exhibit an insufficient level of cohesiveness into the core in some fields.…”

“…The measure of assortativity can be reflected by the network degree correlation index (Crespo et al, 2013;Wei and Pan, 2021;Ye and Qian, 2021). The mean degree of the relevant neighborhood (V j ) for each node i can be calculated from following equations:…”

Exploring the Spatiotemporal Evolution and Sustainable Driving Factors of Information Flow Network: A Public Search Attention Perspective

“…However, Weibo data and Tencent location data have a data processing problem in accurately quantifying information flow. Meanwhile, with the widespread use of search engines on the Internet, an Internet search index that records the search behavior of netizens came into being, which is widely used in the research of economic geography, human geography, and other fields [ 32 , 33 ]. However, most of the current research applied the Internet search index is meant to monitor the public opinion of netizens and dig out hot topics of public concern [ 34 , 35 ].…”

Research on the Evaluation of Resilience and Influencing Factors of the Urban Network Structure in the Three Provinces of Northeast China Based on Multiple Flows

“…Its innovation, low permeability, and external shocks make it difficult to guarantee a quick update and change, leading to increased risk. Hence, the structure's resilience in the matching of urban networks is lower [42]. On this basis, the weighted degree correlation is applied to measure the matching resilience of the structure of the urban network.…”