The Evaluation and Analysis of Spatial and Temporal Evolution of Urban Resilience in the Yangtze River Economic Belt

The construction of resilient cities is the key to guaranteeing the safe and stable development of cities in the face of shocks, and it is affected by various aspects such as ecological construction, economic development, and infrastructure construction conditions. Evaluating urban resilience is of great significance to the sustainable development of cities, as the current urban resilience evaluation system is still inadequate. This paper constructs an urban resilience evaluation system covering ecological, economic, social, infrastructure, and institutional dimensions. Based on the evaluation system, the spatial–temporal evolution characteristics and key influencing factors of urban resilience of 110 prefecture-level cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) were analyzed by methods such as the coefficient of variation, the Hurst exponent, and the obstacle diagnosis model. The results show that from 2002 to 2022, urban resilience in the YREB has significantly improved, and the mean has risen from 0.0429 to 0.1262. The spatial distribution of urban resilience demonstrates a pattern of higher in the east and lower in the west. The average Hurst exponent of urban resilience in the YREB reaches 0.8321, indicating strong sustainability. According to the result of the obstacle diagnosis model, factors in the dimension of economic, infrastructure, and social aspects exert the most significant influence on urban resilience.