An Evaluation of Urban Resilience Using Structural Equation Modeling from Practitioners’ Perspective: An Empirical Investigation in Huangshi City, China

Abstract

As urbanization accelerates and climate change intensifies, cities are increasingly facing risks from natural disasters and human activities. Enhancing urban resilience and strengthening cities’ ability to adapt and recover from disasters have become hot topics globally. Although urban resilience evaluation has been studied from different dimensions, the study of urban resilience from a practitioner’s perspective has received less attention. In this study, based on 1464 valid samples of practitioners in Huangshi City, a structural equation model (SEM) was applied to evaluate urban resilience. The evaluation indicators framework was selected from the economy, ecology, society, and infrastructure dimensions. The findings show that (1) the SEM model provides a scientific basis for establishing an index system for the comprehensive evaluation of urban resilience, and the corresponding correlation coefficients help determine the relative contribution of each indicator. (2) Social resilience accounts for the largest proportion of the entire evaluation system, followed by infrastructure resilience, ecological resilience, and economic resilience. (3) Taking Huangshi City as an empirical research case, the results show that the resilience assessment method based on SEM is feasible, with the resilience of Huangshi City showing an upward trend from 2013 to 2022. Finally, some plausible measures to improve urban resilience based on the evaluation results are discussed.