System dynamics modelling for improving urban resilience in Beijing, China

Resilience building has become increasingly important in the field of urban complexity and sustainable governance. For a better understanding of the adaptive capacity of an urban system, this paper integrated four types of sub-resilience across different domains into the comprehensive urban resilience. Then, a system dynamics (SD) model was established to clarify the causal feedback and dynamic interaction mechanism between the components of urban resilience. Taken the megacity of Beijing as the case, the improvement process of urban resilience was simulated by 2025, and four policy scenarios were set to improve the urban resilience effectively by adjusting endogenous variables. The results showed that the growth of urban resilience would undergo three periods: fast growth exceeded 10% in first two years, while slowed down afterwards in following five years, and finally increased again in the future. The sub-resilience that dominates the urban resilience growth changed from the material and energy resilience to the governance resilience, and then to the socio-economic resilience. Scenarios analysis indicated that all subsystems were sensitive to the policy adjustment except for the socio-economic component. The purpose of this paper is to build a comprehensive and informative resilience development tool for urban managers and planners to maintain the desired status of city operation, as well as respond positively to resilience crisis that might occur in the near future.