Abstract
With the intensification of global climate change and the threat of natural disasters, urban resilience has become the key to assessing the ability of cities to cope with unknown perturbations. This paper took the historic district of Kashgar Old City, an important node city on the Silk Road, as the research object. It made full use of remote sensing technology and GIS advantages and selected 44 key natural disturbance factors closely related to its toughness in response to natural disturbances to construct a PSR model. It evaluated the toughness level of Kashgar Old City in response to natural disturbances in a three-dimensional hierarchy. The results of this study showed that (1) the natural disturbance toughness of the historic district of Kashgar Old City had a toughness grade of II (1.84), meaning its ability to cope with the risk of natural disturbance is low, and the comprehensive ability of the affected area to cope with the risk of natural disturbance is weak. (2) Using the PSR model, it was found that the sudden stress capacity represented by the pressure layer in each criterion layer score was not a critical factor affecting the resilience of the historic district to natural disturbances. The state layer showed a stronger self-regulation capacity in the face of rain flooding and high temperatures, but the response layer's ability to manage the disaster after it occurred was weaker in terms of facing the response to earthquakes and fire prevention. (3) According to the frequency of the main natural disturbance resilience factors in the historic district of Kashgar, we can conclude that rain flooding problems, the scale and density of streets and alleys, and the thermal environment of the district are the main problems faced by the indicator layer.