Regional resilience assessment based on city network risk propagation and cooperative recovery.

With the rapid development of transportation systems and increased connectivity between cities, the capacity of regional cities to propagate risks and cooperate with each other has a great impact on regional resilience. Given that a region can be seen as a networked and multidimensional system with complex interactions of cities, it is necessary to assess regional resilience based on the complex network thinking. This paper views the region as a two-layer coupled city network with risk propagation and cooperative recovery and propose the regional resilience assessment framework. Then, a network of 337 prefecture-level cities in mainland China is used as the study area to assess the impact of different cities on the regional resilience after a sudden public health disaster. The results show that cities in western China have less impact on regional resilience, while cities in central and eastern China have more impact. In addition, we found that each indicator under the three dimensions of regional network resilience has different degrees of correlation with influencing factors. Meanwhile, the changes in the same influencing factor may cause indicators under different dimensions of resilience to increase or decrease. There is a trade-off between approaches to improve regional resilience under each dimension. • Portrays the city network under risk propagation and cooperative recovery with a two-layer coupled network model • Proposes a quantitative regional resilience assessment framework in the dynamic perspective • Assesses the impact of different Chinese cities on regional resilience after a sudden public health disaster • Explores the impact of different elements of the regional city network on its resilience [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]