Resilience difference between growing and shrinking resource-exhausted cities and its influencing factors

Resource-exhausted cities have different development paths in terms of urban growth and urban shrinkage in the transformation process. However, existing studies do not sufficiently understand the divergence of development paths. Taking Zaozhuang and Fuxin, a growing resource-exhausted city and a shrinking resource-exhausted city in China as examples, this study reveals the main causes of the divergence of path evolution in these two cities based on the analysis of resilience differences and their influencing factors. First, due to the insufficient management capacity of local governments, coal resource-exhausted cities will rely excessively on provincial or central government policies during a critical period of transformation and will fail to make long-term and realistic considerations about future strategic choices, thus evolving into shrinking cities. Second, in response to the crisis of coal resource exhaustion, the level of innovation is crucial to foster sustainable industries and thereby influence the future development path of resource-exhausted cities. In addition, a Fisher information-adaptive cycle analysis framework is constructed to explore differences in the development paths of resource-exhausted cities. This provides a new approach to comparing and assessing urban resilience and extends the quantitative adaptive cycle theory approach. Our empirical study proved that this analytical framework is reliable and generalizable.