Evaluation and Barrier Diagnosis of the “Smart-Resilience” of Urban Infrastructure in Kunming, China

Due to the rapid process of urbanization and the threat of environmental hazards, the need to enhance the intelligence and resilience of urban infrastructure has emerged as a pre-eminent demand of sustainable urban development. This paper evaluates the smart-resilience of urban infrastructure in Kunming by creating a well-developed evaluation framework with reference to the DPSIR (Driving Force–Pressure–State–Impact–Response) model and using the Entropy Weight TOPSIS technique to measure infrastructure performance during the years 2020–2024. The study fills an existing gap in the literature regarding the integration of intelligence and resilience evaluation, as well as the dynamic obstacle diagnosis based on causal logic. It provides a transferable analytical framework and empirical evidence for the “smart-resilience” development of similar cities. The findings suggest that there is steady progress in infrastructure smart-resilience in Kunming, whereby the composite index grew from 0.330 to 0.597, which is equivalent to an average growth rate of about 16.0 per annum. In spite of this favorable tendency, there are a number of structural issues that remain unsolved. The driving force dimension is unstable with regard to long-term mechanisms of investment, and the responding dimension is lagging behind, indicating weaknesses in the governance capacity and inter-departmental coordination. Moreover, extreme weather events have become the major threat to infrastructure systems in the city, superseding traditional social and operational risks; consequently, the city has changed its risk profile. Obstacle factor analysis shows that state and response dimensions make up almost 60% of the total constraint level, which shows the significance of enhancing the effectiveness of management. The research findings are based on the proposal of specific policy actions, such as the creation of special infrastructure resilience funds, the enhancement of mechanisms relating to cross-departmental emergency responses, the implementation of risk-based engineering standards, and the creation of an integrated infrastructure data platform to facilitate efficient, resilient, and sustainable urban governance.