What factors affect the structural resilience of urban networks during COVID-19 epidemic? A comparative analysis in China

ABSTRACT Under the COVID-19 epidemic, the structural resilience of urban networks has become an important guarantee for social and economic stability and recovery. In this study, population mobility data and freight demand information are selected to construct urban networks. The complex network is used to describe the development level from five aspects of diversity, equilibrium, reciprocity, assortativity and transmission of network structure. And the entropy weight TOPSIS method is used to calculate the structural resilience of urban network based on the description of development level. We find that as the epidemic increases, the structure of population mobility network and freight demand network shows an evolutionary trend from ‘single-center’ to ‘dual-center’, and then to ‘polycentric’. Meanwhile, a flat network structure is conducive to higher structural resilience. Because the impact of diversity on the structural resilience of population mobility network and freight demand network is respectively 0.541 and 0.142, while the impact of equilibrium is respectively 0.440 and 0.769. The network with high diversity and equilibrium tends to form flat structure and show stronger resilience. Besides, the ‘long-range link’ in the population mobility network and the phenomenon of ‘imbalance transfer’ in the freight demand network can also help to improve the structural resilience of the network. Therefore, cities can establish a flat network through polycentric construction and cross-regional cooperation, while improving the heterogeneity of the urban network, they should also promote all-round and multi-faceted development of the network.