Resilience from the socio-spatial transformation and digitalisation of Chinese cities: Introduction to a special issue

Abstract

Resilience has already become a pivotal topic in planning and urban research. The increasing recognition of urban systems’ capacity to adapt to shocks, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and global financial crisis, necessitates a more nuanced understanding of the concept of ‘urban resilience’. This special issue echoes this imperative by focusing on recent socio-spatial transformations in Chinese cities and the consequential emergence of resilient strategies, particularly those manifested in digital forms, from which to offer new insights into urban resilience. This special issue presents a range of cases analysing how urban resilience is created, negotiated and experienced in response to socio-spatial changes across various scales. These cases range from the macro-level governance shifts, such as the transformation from land/capital-intensive to people-centred urbanisation governance, to micro-level everyday practices, such as the development of platform urbanisms. We further examine the underlying mechanisms of everyday resilience through multiple dimensions, by highlighting political-economic policies at the national level, social capital cultivation at the community level, mutual support at the family level and psychological demands at the individual level.

Introduction

Resilience had already become a central topic in urban studies before the COVID-19 pandemic, spurred by the global financial crisis, a widening social divide and the rise of digitalisation. Many scholars have argued that the survival of urban systems depends on a sustained capacity for adapting to shocks, and that ‘urban resilience’ should not be conflated with sustainability (Davoudi et al., 2012; Martin and Sunley, 2007; Meerow et al., 2016). In this way, urban resilience is distinguished from both ‘engineering resilience’ – aimed at restoring equilibrium, and ‘ecological resilience’ – one that is naturally sustainable. Recently, studies have advanced a more progressive notion: ‘transformative resilience’, meaning that urban systems persist through proactive transitions that lead to a novel and more sustainable regime (Elmqvist et al., 2019; Rao et al., 2024). Thus, the structural reconfiguration of an urban system and the continued existence of urban systems are recognised as inseparable forces underpinning sustainable urban transitions and the long-term persistence of cities and urbanism.

Digital technologies have become critical for developing urban resilience throughout current urban socio-spatial transformations (Brennen and Kreiss, 2016; Graham and Marvin, 2001). Such a trend became particularly evident after the pandemic lockdown, when people embraced or were somehow forced to accept working, studying, playing, shopping and socializing online. While some of these digital activities may diminish in the post-pandemic era, digital technologies are likely to reveal their power more wildly in reshaping the function, arrangement and identity of public spaces, residential neighbourhoods and industrial enclaves (Amin, 2008). In a dystopian vision of digital/virtual cities, people might mostly meet each other in the metaverse while physical public space struggled for pedestrian footfalls. Conversely, digital participation and digital governance provide new opportunities for local communities to foster social networks and make their voices heard in urban governance. The digitalisation process has been seen in different domains of everyday lives with complicated implications.

Given the background, this special issue focuses on the recent socio-spatial transformations in Chinese cities and the consequential emergence of resilient strategies, particularly those manifested in digital forms, from which to offer new insights into urban resilience. This special issue presents a range of cases analysing how urban resilience is created, negotiated and experienced in response to socio-spatial changes across various scales. These cases range from the overarching change of governance from land/capital-intensive to people-centred urbanisation, to everyday practices such as platform urbanism. The underlying mechanisms of urban resilience are further investigated through multiple dimensions, highlighting political-economic policies at the national level, social capital cultivation at the community level, mutual support at the family level and psychological demands at the individual level.

Digital socio-spatial resilience in urban China in the new era

Against the recent transformations in multiple aspects, a regime shift from land/capital-intensive to people-centred urbanisation in China become essential, in light of the opportunities and challenges arising from the profound socio-economic transformations following the pandemic. Li (2025, in this issue) argues that conventional conceptualisations of ‘urban’ have been heavily biased towards a rigid rural-urban divide and arbitrary quantitative metrics, drawing on critiques against Louis Wirth’s notions of anonymity, individualism and social disorganisation, and on Neil Brenner’s theory of ‘planetary urbanism’ which connects processes of urbanisation in cities with rural, remote and even wild areas at the global scale. This work instead proposes a novel framework for deep and people-centred urbanisation comprising five key interrelated dimensions: social integration, economic security, cultural and psychological belonging, political participation and environmental justice. This work further reflects upon how the rapid urbanisation of China’s four largest megacities – Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou – have marginalised migrant workers through rigid household registration controls, driving them out once their use values are exploited or confining them within ‘urban villages’ (chengzhongcun), often under harsh living conditions. He also sheds light on two emerging approaches to post-pandemic urban transitions, including Wuhan’s co-production of community projects (e.g., little public/shared spaces and community kitchen) derived from local yet bottom-up adaptations to pandemic disruptions, and Chengdu’s ‘Park City’ initiative aimed at improving residents’ welling being through a metropolitan network of green belts, parks and recreational infrastructure – a timely response to the growing public desire for nature and health after the pandemic.

While people-centred urbanisation has gained momentum, the ways this process is mediated by digitalisation, as well as the impact on resilient and sustainable urban transitions, remain underexplored. A study from this special issue helps address the knowledge gap. Using Guangzhou as a case study, Cai et al. (2025, in this issue) examine how state and market forces converge into a complex, entrepreneurial and contested assemblage in the formation and operation of digital, unified and data-driven urban management platforms at the municipal level – a process aligned with ‘platform urbanism’. Platform urbanism highlights the growing role of data-driven, algorithmic and platform-based governance systems as digital-material, socio-political assemblages that mediate relations between cities, corporations and residents (Caprotti et al., 2022; Sadowski, 2020), leading to challenges and opportunities for the right to the city amid accelerating digitalisation (Leszczynski, 2020). In Guangzhou, digital governance platforms were unexpectedly strengthened by the pandemic, as many disease-control measures required large-scale collection of people’s personal information – e.g., the ‘health code’ system for tracking individual’s mobility history and potential exposure. This work identifies that the lack of coordination among different levels and branches of governments continues to restrict the effectiveness of digital management platforms that rely on big data, advanced information technology infrastructure and sophisticated algorithms. In other words, data, technology and algorithms can not foster urban ‘smartness’, if disconnected from robust human capitals, active public participation and strong (co-)governance capacities. As a result, despite the government’s prominent role in establishing and maintaining digital management platforms, private technology companies manage to evade essential responsibilities for sustaining effective smart management, while turning essential public services into long-term, profitable quasi-public business – e.g., a digital platform provider may obtain exclusive contracts for public carpark management. Therefore, this work advocates structural reforms in governance regimes that prioritise adaptability and innovation over institutional stability, rejecting the practice of putting ‘old wine in new bottles’. Their investigation highlights the urgency of transitioning urban governance through digital platforms, as the volume and sensitivity of data accumulated by these platforms may already exceed existing regulatory capacities.

Digital resilience in everyday lives and its psychological implications

Furthermore, digital resilience has been found at multiple scales, exerting imperative effects on shaping people’s everyday lives. A novel investigation, provided by Yu et al. (2025, in this issue), is presented into the trend of the growing expatriate migration to China in the new era, focusing on how multi-scalar factors, especially the online information-seeking behaviours, shape the migration decision-making. While the traditional perspectives focused on China as a source of emigration, recently, initiatives like the Belt and Road, have stimulated new employment opportunities, enhanced convenience, and compelling incentives for foreign migration (Guo et al., 2022). This timely study examines the motivations, patterns and influencing factors behind expatriates’ intention to move to China. In a post-crisis time, migration decisions are not merely influenced by objective factors illustrated by theories such as human capital and social network, but are highly reliant on one’s intentions, aspirations and perceptions towards the destination (Li et al., 2025; Lin et al., 2023). This study highlights the psychological aspect, employing the 2020 census data and the recent Google Trends data. Authors reveal a diverse array of source countries of expatriates, with significant contributions from across Asia (e.g., Myanmar, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, India), North America (USA, Canada), Europe (UK, France, Germany, Russia) and Oceania (Australia). Spatially, expatriates exhibite a discernible concentration in key urban centres such as Beijing and Guangzhou, as well as in the Yunnan province and various south-eastern coastal regions. Spanish-language searches for migration-related keywords demonstrated the highest intensity, closely followed by English, suggesting distinct regional interests in migrating to China. The research findings identify ‘China policy’ as the primary driver of expatriate migration, followed by ‘China travel’. Conversely, the negative association with ‘China culture’ warrants critical consideration, as anticipation of deep cultural integration could turn out into a challenge than a contribution. In an era of digitalisation, online information-seeking behaviour has been acting as one of the copying strategies for expatriates to maintain their resilience against the rapid changes in economic and socio-political spheres worldwide. For countries and regions that receive expatriates, positive interactions between policy environment, economic incentives and cultural factors could critically modulate migration experiences and eventually reshape global mobility trends.

The research from Chen et al. (2025, in this issue) further zooms into Shenzhen – the ‘immigrant city’ in China – to examine the group of expatriates who lived through disrupted everyday experiences during the pandemic, and demonstrates how belonging is created and negotiated. Notably, this paper challenges traditional conceptualisations of belonging based on an immutable geographical location, and criticises such a static perspective for overlooking the power of mobility in sculpturing belonging (Kwan, 2012). This study conceptualises belonging from a resilient angle by integrating the ‘mobile forms of belonging’ framework (Arp Fallov et al., 2013) with the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Urry, 2016), and develops an inherently multi-scalar framework to understanding belonging across local, urban and transnational dimensions. Specifically, authors examine this resilient belonging through three transformations in mobility in the case city of Shenzhen, including temporal patterns of movement as rhythms of mobility, their access to vital social and material support networks as resources for mobility, and the overarching structural constraints met as conditions of mobility, to unpack transnational migrants’ sense of belonging during the pandemic crisis. After identifying five distinct typologies of belonging among migrants residing in Shenzhen, the authors further explore the influencing factors. As a result, there is a critical divergence between temporary sojourners and settled migrants, with a reduction in number in the former group and a stable development of the latter group. While career advancement and educational opportunities serve as pivotal motivators for belonging, shorter tenures or restrictive visa statuses undermine migrants’ emotional attachments to the city. They argue that negotiated mobility has worked as a resilient strategy to (re)develop belonging, specifically through adaptive strategies such as ‘homing’ and the digital participation in local networks, leveraging digital connectivity and fostering localised community engagement, in response to exogenous shocks. This work offers a nuanced and comprehensive typology of belonging for transnational migrants, ultimately underscoring multi-scale sense of belonging to be contingent upon mobility rhythms, equitable resource access and complex multi-scalar interactions.

As societies struggle through the pandemic, there are signals that the economy and local communities have revived. The work of Zhuang et al. (2025, in this issue) investigates the resilience of residents’ mental health and its influencing mechanisms by tracing its fluctuations during and after the recent pandemic crisis, paying attention to the effects from the increasing use of digital technologies. While scholars have focused on the pronounced psychological degradation in cities like Wuhan and Shanghai when societies were severely threatened by the spread of Covid-19 pandemic (Shen et al., 2025), comprehensive research into the resilience of society in terms of mental health remains limited. Consequently, the contributing factors, recovery patterns and protracted psychological ramifications warrant thorough examination through longitudinal observations of societies. Using a Shanghai community as a case study, the authors record residents’ mental health status across three distinct time phases, namely the initial pandemic surge, the inter-peak period and the second pandemic wave. Their results identify a temporal rebound in residents’ mental health status, underscoring significant resilience achieved through an intricate interplay of individual, familial and societal mechanisms. This resilience is largely attributable to the reduction in individual stressors, a decrease in familial conflicts and an enhanced satisfaction with housing and institutional support. Specifically, at the individual level, perceived insecurity relating to food, housing and jobs demonstrably exacerbate mental health degradation. The family level influences present an unilinear trajectory, with tensions escalating during the lockdown but dissipating as family arrangements returned to normalcy. At the community level, although close-knit social networks provide an emotional buffer, frequent digital interactions during the crisis inadvertently heightened anxiety through overexposure to pandemic-related concerns, a phenomenon corroborated by existing literature (Shen et al., 2025). Notably, there are sustained mental health degradation effects from economic instability and residual fears of infection throughout the three periods of time. Conversely, trust in community governance to a certain extend heal psychological anxiety only during the initial wave of social distance policies, whereas satisfaction for housing emerges as a contributing factor to mental health exclusively in the second wave of social distance policies. Overall, this paper demonstrates the potential to build resilience of mental health through a three-dimensional framework of individual, familial and societal strata. The transformation and mechanisms of mental health resilience depends on local contexts, it is common for planning and urban policies to prioritise economic stabilisation, implement robust family support initiatives and foster institutional trust to mitigate the enduring psychological legacy from the pandemic and relevant risks.

Concluding remarks

In an era of fluctuations and uncertainties, human behaviours, mobility patterns and governance paradigms are undergoing profound changes. These shifts, while deeply rooted in the broader socio-economic transformations, have given rise to new adaptive, innovative and sometimes resistant responses, as introduced in this special issue, through which urban resilience is consistently (re)constructed. In other words, the vulnerability of many contemporary urban systems and their potential for bottom-up innovation in response to these transformations, underlines the importance of developing more nuanced understanding of ‘urban resilience’. This calls for moving beyond merely focusing on what the ability of cities is to absorb the disturbances from natural disasters, to how the capacity of cities could adapt to a range of new urban issues (e.g., virtualisation/digitalisation of urban life).

The articles in this special issue represent a wide range of new trends within China’s socio-spatial transformation, both during and after the pandemic crisis, enriching the scholarly and public understanding of the concept of urban resilience. As urban spaces are striving to relieve economies and societies from the destruction and bruises left by the pandemic and other recent challenges, the empirical knowledge on Chinese cities presented in this special issue emphasises a few emergent features in the cultivation of urban resilience. These include, but are not limited to, the people-centred governance, the digitalisation of social and economic networks, the ethos of community space co-production, the policy environment compatible to global migration, the dynamics of mobility and the restorative impacts from homing and participation. The knowledge of urban China offered can contribute to the ongoing development of urban resilience scholarship, spanning from critical examinations of governance practices and everyday lived experiences to theoretical reflections on traditional perspectives and Western-centric urban theories (Li, 2024; Wu, 2024). We hope this special issue will catalyse further grounded research into urban resilience through diverse scales, perspectives and trends in and beyond Chinese cities.