Assessing the impact of population urbanization on urban resilience: Empirical evidence from rapidly urbanizing China

The accelerated process of population urbanization (PU) highlights the critical need to assess its correlation with urban resilience for contemporary resilient city building. Yet, limited research has systematically examined this relationship. Existing studies often overemphasize the disaster risks linked to PU while overlooking its potential positive contributions to urban resilience. We pioneeringly integrate both PU and urban resilience into the urban sustainable development research system, contributing to provide insights for the current resilient city building by comprehensively considering the development opportunities and disaster risks associated with PU. By extending the two-way FE and the SDM using panel data from 280 Chinese key cities (2011−2022), we empirically examine its direct impacts, spatio-temporal heterogeneity and spatial spillover effects. Results demonstrate that: (1) PU enhances urban resilience, primarily through economic agglomeration and technological innovation, and synergies between the two mechanisms. (2) PU positively influences urban economic and engineering subsystem resilience but moderately reduces urban social and ecological subsystem resilience. (3) The marginal effect of PU on overall and subsystem resilience increases progressively over time. (4) The influence of PU on urban and subsystem resilience is greater in relatively underdeveloped regions. (5) PU exhibits' positive spatial spillover impacts on surrounding cities' resilience within a 300 km radius.