Spatiotemporal Dynamics and Regional Disparities of Urban Resilience in China’s Mining Cities

Building safe and resilient cities is a key objective of China’s urbanisation and a prerequisite for high-quality development. This study assesses urban resilience in 73 mining cities from 2014 to 2023 using a composite index system (30 indicators) structured around robustness, resistance, and recovery. We integrate ARIMA-based forecasting, kernel density estimation, and Dagum Gini decomposition to characterise spatiotemporal dynamics and quantify regional inequality. Urban resilience increases steadily over the study period and can be characterised by three sequential stages, with further gains forecast for 2024–2030. Spatially, high-resilience cities shift from a dispersed pattern to belt-like and clustered agglomerations, consistent with an increasingly stratified centre–periphery structure. Inequality is driven primarily by between-region disparities: the East performs best, followed by the Central region, whereas the West and Northeast lag behind, revealing a pronounced gap between the Northeast and the East, alongside relatively convergent Central–West trajectories. These patterns are associated with interacting differences in location and market development, fiscal capacity and transition pathways, infrastructure endowment and ecological constraints, and institutional and demographic dynamics. The findings underscore the need for place-based regional coordination and targeted investments to strengthen recovery-related capacities.