Rethinking the urban resilience: Extension and connotation

In recent years, urban resilience has attracted increasing attention from researchers and managers from the international community at the national, regional, and urban levels. Numerous multi-dimensional and cross-disciplinary investigations, campaigns, and outlines have significantly promoted the development goal of resilience in cities worldwide. However, the existing definitions and interpretations of urban resilience still call for a more comprehensive, systematic, and exhaustive analysis as urbanization accelerates and the complex risks of various safety events increase. To this end, we rethink the extension and connotation of urban resilience based on a review and analysis of critical hotspots, realistic demand, and development trends. A conceptual classification with three aspects and three typical tiers of urban resilience is proposed, which further promotes a new definition and interpretation by incorporating the resilience extension of urban systems. In addition, the six-dimensional characteristics are extracted to furnish the urban resilience connotation, and four-stage improvement measures are introduced accordingly. In addition, the newly developed urban resilience is applied to a case analysis of a large-scale disaster, which demonstrates the necessity and significance of this study. The new extension and connotation investigation will be helpful for the improvement and implementation of urban resilience, thereby guiding the construction of resilient cities.