All Roads Lead to Rome: The Role of Road Networks in the Economic Resilience of Cities

Status: Currently under development
This paper investigates the determinants of urban resilience, focusing on the role of market accessibility in urban specialization. We suggest effective resilience strategies should address regional transport mobility and integrated resilience planning to leverage the strengths of interconnected urban areas. We distinguish industrial agglomeration among cities through machine learning algorithms and construct composite weights to measure spatial dependencies and interactions among cities. Our results show that: market accessibility to developed cities, especially road networks through network analysis algorithms, can promote rapid economic recovery from recession. Industrial agglomeration among cities can further amplify such positive effects and benefit surrounding regions.