Achieving resilience through smart cities? Evidence from China

Studies of the resilience of smart cities can provide new insights for the sustainable development of cities, with important practical significance for improving their carrying capacity, disaster resistance, and development capacity. However, despite the recent large-scale development of smart cities in China, it is still uncertain whether smart cities could effectively promote urban resilience. Exploiting the quasi-experimental nature of smart city development in China, this paper uses DID and PSM-DID to determine their impact on urban resilience. Four aspects of urban resilience are analyzed: economic resilience, social resilience, ecological resilience, and infrastructure resilience. The results show that the development of smart cities can improve social resilience considerably without any obvious effect on economic and ecological resilience and even negatively affect infrastructure resilience; the distribution effect, technological effect, and structural effect are important mechanisms for smart cities to influence urban resilience; and smart cities that have a sound industrial structure, enough good-quality companies, large size, and a large pool of highly-skilled labor are much more likely to be associated with a high level of urban resilience. Policy suggestions are also provided to promote the simultaneous improvement of smart cities and urban resilience, and hence help establish a new ‘urban resilience’ model.