Spatiotemporal Variation and Inequality in China’s Economic Resilience across Cities and Urban Agglomerations

Economic resilience is a critical indicator of the sustainable development of an urban economy. This paper measures the urban economic resilience (UER) of 286 major cities in China from six indicators—economic growth, opening up, social development, environmental protection, natural conditions, and technological innovation—using a subjective and objective weighting method and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods. Furthermore, kernel density estimation (KDE) was used to reveal the spatial and temporal trends in UER across cities, and a social opportunity function was applied to access the opportunity for economic resilience and the fairness of opportunities for economic resilience in 19 urban agglomerations in China. The results show that the UER was, in general, low across all cities but increased over time. Geographically, the UER disperses from the eastern coast to inland cities. Amongst urban agglomerations in China, the economic resilience opportunity index also varies spatially and increases over time. On the other hand, the opportunity fairness index of UER remained largely stable and substantial inequalities exist across all urban agglomerations, indicating the need for differentiated policy intervention to ensure equality and the sustainable development of the region. The methodology developed in this research can also be applied in other cities and regions to test its re-applicability and to understand the UER in different contexts.