The concept of resilience, originally rooted in mechanics, describes a material’s capacity to return to its initial state after stress. By extension, urban resilience refers to a city’s ability to maintain stability, adapt to disturbances, and recover functionality in the face of systemic shocks (Martin & Sunley, 2015). As urbanization accelerates, cities concentrate populations, capital, and infrastructure, becoming complex socio-ecological systems. These dynamics increase vulnerabilities to economic disruptions, environmental risks, and public health crises. Recognizing these challenges, China formally included the goal of building “resilient cities” in its 2020 national planning agenda.

Existing research shows that cities often recover relatively quickly from natural shocks such as earthquakes or epidemics (Cavallo et al., 2013; Jedwab et al., 2022). Yet disruptions to economic and institutional structures tend to have longer-lasting effects on urban trajectories (Glaeser, 2022). Historical experience illustrates this divergence: the shift from canal-based to maritime trade precipitated Yangzhou’s decline and coastal cities’ rise during the late Qing dynasty (Cao & Chen, 2022). In more recent decades, advances in digital technologies have transformed Silicon Valley into a global innovation hub, while leaving traditional industrial cities increasingly marginalized. These cases highlight that resilience is shaped not only by physical infrastructure and disaster preparedness but also by deeper structural and technological dynamics.

The global rise of digital technologies, and their evolution into a digital economy, is one such transformative force (Goldfarb & Tucker, 2019). Digital tools enhance forecasting, coordination, and service delivery, thereby improving cities’ capacity to respond to risks (Xu et al., 2024). However, their benefits are unevenly distributed, reflecting the persistent “digital divide.” The literature identifies three dimensions of this divide (Lythreatis et al., 2022): (1) First-level digital divide centers on inequalities in access to the internet. (2) Second-level digital divide focuses on inequalities in digital skills and online engagement. (3) Third-level digital divide highlights inequalities in outcome (specifically, internet-derived benefits) despite equal access, skills, and online behaviors. While national and regional digital divides are well documented, the impacts of intra-urban infrastructure inequality remain insufficiently studied. For instance, Harrison and Heley (2015) reveal how spatial inequalities and governance structures condition regional resilience, suggesting that internal fragmentation within regions profoundly matters. Similarly, Lee et al. (2025) show that Korea’s national smart city program highlights the importance of institutional design and inclusiveness for building resilience. Together, these studies indicate that digital infrastructure disparities within cities are likely to have profound effects on resilience, yet this dimension remains underexplored.

This study focuses on the first-level digital divide (inequalities in infrastructure access) by using geolocated data on 4G base stations across Chinese prefecture-level cities. We demonstrate that intra-urban digital divides weaken economic resilience by alternating new firm entry, slowing innovation diffusion, and reducing industrial diversity. The detrimental effect is most pronounced in cities characterized by greater economic development, advanced digitization, larger inflows of migrants, and a more uniform educational background among their residents. Moreover, we find that local digital fragmentation generates negative spillovers, weakening resilience in neighboring cities.

Our contribution is threefold. First, we extend the literature on urban resilience by introducing digital infrastructure inequality rather than digital infrastructure/economy level as a critical determinant. Prior studies emphasize the role of physical infrastructure (Li et al., 2023), governance (Woodruff et al., 2021), and digital economy indicators more broadly (Shen et al., 2025; Xu et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2024). While the rapid development of the digital economy has generated aggregate growth dividends, its internal unequal distribution also constitutes a potential structural risk. We focus specifically on the digital divide, and our mechanism analysis highlights how inequalities in firm entry, innovation, and industrial diversity channel its effects on resilience. Second, we contribute to measurement by constructing a novel index of intra-urban digital inequality, based on the dispersion of 4G base stations across counties within prefecture-level cities. Existing studies usually examine inter-regional or inter-city divides (Etherington & Jones, 2009; Fiaschi et al., 2018), but to our knowledge, no work has systematically measured digital fragmentation within cities. Third, by documenting negative spillovers across neighboring cities, we emphasize the need for coordinated governance. These findings contribute to global discussions on resilient and inclusive urban development, aligning with the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda.

The remainder of this study is organized as follows: Section 2 reviews the relevant literature on digital divides and urban resilience. Section 3 develops the theoretical framework and hypotheses. Section 4 introduces the data and methods. Section 5 presents the empirical findings and robustness tests. Section 6 provides extended analyses, including mechanisms, spatial effects, and distributional heterogeneity. Section 7 concludes with policy implications and potential avenues for future research.

Source link