Detecting the intellectual pathway of resilience thinking in urban and regional studies: A critical reflection on resilience literature

Abstract

Confronted with increasing natural and anthropogenic crises, sustainable urban and regional development requires a sound understanding of how cities and regions respond to those crises and how that response shapes their continued development. The conceptual ambiguity and missing link among varied perspectives of resilience studies have given rise to a sneaking suspicion about the contribution of resilience thinking. By conducting a network analysis of 1,274 papers published between 1991 and 2019 using CiteSpace, we detect and visualize the intellectual pathway of resilience thinking and argue for its malleability to deepen our understanding about human‐environment dynamics. Three major research clusters were identified: adaptive capacity of ecosystems, regional variation in economic resilience, and social resilience of disadvantaged communities. Resistance and recovery of systems are the key concerns in the first two clusters, whereas social resilience emphasizes opportunities and processes of restructuring rather than returning to the pre‐crisis status. The extension of resilience thinking to the social realm is a promising area for future research. It calls for a shift of epistemology from the deterministic structure‐function hypothesis which is place‐less toward a situated understanding of context, relation, and human adaptation despite the methodological challenges ahead.