Varying road network resilience of Chinese cities

Abstract

China boasts a multitude of cities exhibiting distinctly spatial characteristics, leading to variations in resilience. While attention has been garnered in individual cities, comprehensive studies for the whole system are scarce. Visualising and comparing the variations of spatial resilience across cities prove valuable in understanding disparities among city systems in terms of their spatial development and resilience consequences. This research measures the evolving resilience of spatial networks in nearly all cities within mainland China under intentional attack scenarios. Chinese cities exhibit different compositions of evolutional efficiency and scale effects when attacks exacerbate. The regions detected by the dissimilar compositions of spatiotemporal resilience showcase the spatial heterogeneity of road network resilience. Road network resilience of individual cities is related to city size and urbanised levels, but uncertainty is still revealed. Forming such an individual and regional scope to scrutinise the in-depth structure of spatial resilience of many cities can aid in allocating relevant spatial policies and evaluating the structural resilience risk for given cities in subject to all others.