Jul 2026· Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution· Vol 14· 0 citations· 113 references
Abstract
The rapid expansion of digital infrastructure has created new opportunities for promoting sustainable urban development and optimizing urban spatial governance. However, whether digital infrastructure can reshape urban spatial development patterns and mitigate urban sprawl remains unclear. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of digital infrastructure on urban sprawl and to explore the underlying mechanisms. Using the Broadband China pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment, this study empirically investigates the impact of digital infrastructure on urban expansion patterns in China. The results indicate that digital infrastructure significantly promotes more sustainable and compact urban expansion by mitigating excessive urban sprawl. These findings remain robust across a series of robustness and endogeneity tests. Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the effects are more pronounced in eastern cities, as well as in cities with larger population sizes, higher levels of marketization and urbanization, and those designated as comprehensive big data pilot zones. Mechanism analysis suggests that it facilitates innovation and entrepreneurial vitality while accelerating industrial upgrading, thereby contributing to a more efficient and sustainable urban spatial structure. Importantly, the expansion of digital infrastructure does not induce urban shrinkage; instead, it enhances regional economic resilience and supports coordinated urban development. Overall, this study provides new evidence on the ecological and spatial implications of digital infrastructure, offering important policy insights for sustainable urban planning and spatial resource allocation.
Against the backdrop of increasingly complex urban risks, enhancing urban resilience through effective policy tools has become an important issue in urban governance. Taking the national Innovative City Pilot Program as a quasi-natural experiment, this study uses panel data from 287 prefecture-level and higher cities in China from 2011 to 2021 and employs a multi-period difference-in-differences model to examine the impact of innovative city policies on urban resilience. The results show that innovative city policies significantly enhance urban resilience, and this conclusion remains robust after parallel trends tests, placebo tests, and robustness checks. Further analysis indicates that digital infrastructure, urban innovation capacity, and fiscal expenditure on science and technology positively moderate the relationship between innovative city policies and urban resilience. These findings suggest that innovative city policies not only promote technological innovation and economic development, but also serve as important governance tools for improving cities’ shock resistance, adaptability, and recovery capacity. This study enriches the research on the policy determinants of urban resilience and provides empirical evidence for promoting the coordinated development of innovation-driven growth and resilient city construction.
Xiang Li· Advances in Education, Human...· 0 citations
Rapid urbanization has caused cities to face problems such as traffic congestion, resource scarcity, and environmental pollution. Digital transformation based on technological progress will offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance urban resilience. Therefore, this paper constructs a comprehensive multi-indicator assessment framework with q-rung orthopair 2-tuple fuzzy linguistic sets and utilizes the full consistency method to improve the accuracy of the model. Then, the level of area-wide digital transformation and urban resilience of 158 Chinese cities are assessed and the relationship between them is explored. The results reveal for the first time that cities remain at a relatively low level in digital transformation and urban resilience, with significant imbalances across different resilience dimensions. The results also indicate that digital transformation generally exerts a positive impact on total resilience, specifically by effectively enhancing infrastructure, economic, and institutional resilience, although it does not significantly contribute to social and environmental resilience. This study provides a new insight into the relationship between digitalization and urban resilience, offering valuable reference for advancing high-quality urbanization.
As urbanization accelerates and cities continuously expand and reshape their built environments, understanding the impact of urban spatial structure on ecological resilience has become increasingly crucial for promoting sustainable urban development. Based on grid population data and ecosystem-related data from 2007 to 2019 in Chinese prefecture-level cities, this study employs ESDA spatial exploratory analysis and entropy method to measure the degree of urban spatial structure and the level of ecological resilience. On this basis, the two-way fixed effects model, instrumental variables, and other methods are used to explore the impact of urban spatial structure on ecological resilience. We find that compact spatial structure is conducive to strengthening ecological resilience within cities. In other words, urban decentralization tends to weaken internal ecological resilience, and this effect is particularly pronounced in cities in central and western China, non-resource cities, and cities with high levels of digital development and infrastructure, and low levels of green innovation. Furthermore, mechanism tests reveal that improving climate suitability and promoting industrial sustainability are the influencing mechanisms. Finally, the study suggests that, in promoting urban construction, the government should thoroughly implement the concepts of ecological diversity protection and economic coordinated development, and reasonably plan urban spatial structure based on the current state of cities to improve the quality of living environments.
Shi Chen, Qingfei Yang, Jiaxin Gao· Humanities and Social Scienc...· 0 citations
Enhancing urban ecological resilience is key to addressing resource exhaustion and urban decline in resource-exhausted cities, as it facilitates the re-coordination of the human-land relationship territorial system. Using panel data from 281 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2023, we apply the multi-period Difference-in-Differences (DID) model to estimate the impact of supportive policies on urban ecological resilience. The results show that supportive policies significantly improve ecological resilience, with pronounced effects on resistance and adaptability, while the effect on recoverability remains limited. Mechanism analysis indicates that the policy works through promoting green innovation, reducing energy consumption, and strengthening environmental governance. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effects vary across geographic locations and resource types. Supportive policies generate significant spatial spillover effects on enhancing urban ecological resilience and exhibit an evolutionary sequence of radiation, siphoning, equilibrium, and decline as geographic distance increases. These findings inform policy design for ecological restoration and regional coordination in resource-dependent regions.
Under the dual pressures of climate warming and accelerated urbanization, agricultural ecosystems face severe challenges including shrinking land resources and intensifying non-point source pollution. While smart city initiatives can deliver technological support for coordinated urban–rural ecological governance, extant literature largely overlooks agricultural perspectives and urban–rural interactive mechanisms, leaving the underlying transmission channels underexplored. Using panel data from 264 prefecture-level cities in China over the period 2005–2022, this study incorporates agricultural technological innovation into the policy evaluation framework. Employing a multi-period difference-in-differences model, we estimate the dynamic policy-associated effects of the smart city pilot policy on urban ecological resilience, and conduct heterogeneity and mediation analyses. Our findings indicate that: first, the smart city pilot is positively associated with urban ecological resilience, with the effect exhibiting a 2-year lag. Second, this association varies significantly across city types, with more pronounced policy-associated effects observed in large cities, non-resource-based cities, and non-old industrial bases. Third, human capital accumulation and agricultural technological innovation serve as two core transmission channels. This study provides empirical evidence for the mechanism through which smart cities may enhance ecological resilience via agricultural technological innovation, and offers policy references for the coordinated development of smart cities and eco-agriculture tailored to different city characteristics. This paper constructs an interdisciplinary logic of digital governance, ecological optimization and urban agriculture, and clarifies how smart city infrastructure improves the basic ecological conditions supporting crop production and regional food security.
Dacan Li, Xiaoyu Zhang, Yuanyuan Gong et al.· Frontiers in Sustainable Foo...· 0 citations
Digital technologies are reshaping the spatial organization of economic activities, expanding cities’ access to external innovation resources across geographical boundaries, and creating new pathways for sustainable urban development. Using panel data for 279 prefecture-level cities in China from 2011 to 2022, this study constructs an urban digital network based on the cross-city organizational linkages of listed digital firms and their subsidiaries and measures virtual agglomeration by combining network linkages with urban digital foundations. The results show that virtual agglomeration significantly promotes urban innovation, and this finding remains robust to instrumental-variable estimation, alternative measures, and lagged specifications. Virtual agglomeration also strengthens the ability of latecomer cities to translate innovation gaps into subsequent growth. Both local digital foundations and external digital linkages contribute to this effect, while knowledge-related variety serves as an important transmission channel. The positive relationship is more pronounced in resource-based, third-tier, non-urban-agglomeration, and western cities. Further analysis shows that virtual agglomeration significantly promotes urban green innovation, indicating that its innovation effect extends to environmentally oriented technological development. Overall, virtual agglomeration improves access to innovation resources, supports innovation catch-up in less-developed cities, and, by promoting green technological innovation, offers a digital-network-based pathway toward more coordinated and sustainable urban development.
Ming-que Ye, Hao Yan, Junyu Yang et al.· Sustainability· 0 citations
