Economic resilience, a key variable shaping the evolution of urban economies, refers to the capacity of an economy to effectively withstand external shocks or internal structural pressures, recover rapidly, and subsequently adapt or even undergo transformation and upgrading. Urban economic resilience is not merely a one-dimensional concept of withstanding shocks, but a composite concept encompassing multiple dimensions and dynamic processes. Its meaning should therefore be understood systematically from structural, dynamic, and spatial perspectives.

Industrial foundations

From a structural perspective, urban economic resilience is underpinned by a diversified industrial system. Cities with overly concentrated industrial structures or a high degree of dependence on localized supply chains have limited room for maneuver and few alternatives when confronted with cyclical fluctuations in specific industries or external shocks. As a result, they are more susceptible to adverse path lock-in, making it difficult to adjust their development trajectories and recover economically after shocks.

In contrast, a diversified industrial structure encompassing sectors with different demand elasticities, technological intensities, export orientations, and levels of exposure to external competition can, through cross-sectoral risk buffering and flexible factor allocation, respond rapidly to shifts in market demand, absorb shocks affecting individual sectors, smooth economic fluctuations, and reduce uncertainty. Meanwhile, industrial diversity creates greater room for policy adjustment and factor reorganization, enabling cities to draw on a wider range of response strategies and transformation pathways when facing external shocks.

Driving forces

From a dynamic perspective, urban economic resilience arises from an innovation-driven process of adaptive restructuring. Economic resilience is not a static capacity for resistance, but a dynamic process of resistance, recovery, adaptation, and transformation. Major external shocks are often accompanied by “creative destruction,” accelerating the release of production factors from declining sectors and creating room for their reallocation to emerging fields.

Innovation plays a crucial role in this process by directing capital, technology, labor, data, and other factors toward more efficient, higher value-added sectors, thereby reshaping regional comparative advantages and driving economic restructuring toward higher-quality development. This capacity for adaptive restructuring depends on sustained R&D investment and technological accumulation by market actors, as well as an inclusive and prudent institutional environment established by the government to provide stable expectations and institutional safeguards for the development of new technologies, new forms of business, and new business models.

Strategic depth

From a spatial perspective, urban economic resilience is rooted in open and coordinated regional networks. It depends on a city’s own industrial foundations and resource endowments, as well as regional spatial structures and the broader pattern of national economic geography.

Under open economic conditions, cities can effectively broaden their access to resources, disperse the risks posed by external shocks, and strengthen their capacity to adapt to complex environments by integrating into higher-level spatial networks such as metropolitan areas and urban agglomerations. Greater integration within metropolitan areas and urban agglomerations can expand market scale and facilitate resource sharing, industrial collaboration and functional specialization, as well as technological spillovers and innovation cooperation, thereby strengthening cities’ capacity to withstand external shocks.

At the national level, coordinated regional development strategies, major regional strategies, and main functional area strategies provide institutional safeguards and strategic guidance for cities to leverage complementary strengths, share risks, and pursue coordinated development across broader spatial scales, thereby continuously strengthening urban economic resilience through coordination across multiple regional levels.

Wu Zhanyun is an associate research fellow from the Research Institute for Eco-civilization at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.