As the key link and spatial form of urbanization in China, metropolitan region development has become a strategic frontier issue in the field of regional planning and territorial resilience. This paper defines the essence of territorial resilience of metropolitan regions, analyses the capacity of the system and its elements, and builds a regional planning framework. An evaluation indicator system is constructed to evaluate the territorial resilience level and identify the limiting factors in the Wuhan metropolitan region by utilizing the grey correlation model and the obstacle degree model. The results show that the resilience of Wuhan metropolitan region forms an overall pattern of one core area and four sub-regions in the east, west, north and south. According to the different limiting factors of resilience, cities can be divided into three types: cities limited by both policy and spatial resource factors, cities with lagging socioeconomic factors, and cities with insufficient innovation factors. This paper proposes planning response strategies to enhance resilience from two spatial levels. At the regional level this can be done by building a gradually balanced urban system, establishing three areas based on the degree of resilience factor agglomeration, while at the urban level it can be accomplished by maintaining ecological security, promoting economic agglomeration development and constructing innovation networks.

The Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) is one of four major national development strategies in China, accomplishing the balance between protection and development of YREB has long-term and comprehensive significance to the implementation of China’s green development concept. This paper aims to have a more comprehensive understanding of the green development level of 126 cities in YREB from 2008 to 2017 by constructing an innovative evaluation system of “capacity level-coordination level-comprehensive level”. And on this basis, further analysis is carried out to check whether there is spatial effect in green development by means of the Markov chain. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) Urban green development comprehensive level in YREB is characterized by convergence, and the convergence phenomenon is more prominent in high-level cities; (2) In general, the distribution of high-value cities is decreasing from east to west; (3) The transition of club convergence is significantly influenced by neighbor background. Overall, the YREB is undergoing a transformation to step into the greener development path, still needs to take a series of synergistic guidance strategies to solve the problem of unbalanced regional development.

City networks refer to the connections of physical or virtual flows among cities at different spatial scales, including population migration networks, economic networks, information networks and innovation networks. This concept has gradually evolved into an important paradigm for understanding the regional spatial structures. Based on Baidu Index data within the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) in China, this paper constructs an information network and investigates its connection patterns. Using social network analysis, the structural differentiation of the information network is further investigated at both the overall and subregional scales. The results show that the connection patterns of the information network exhibit an obvious hierarchical structure, with the complexity of the spatial pattern gradually increasing from the upstream to the downstream regions. Furthermore, the structural assessment results suggest that the information network is characterized by high agglomeration, high mobility, high hierarchy and low disassortativity. These findings indicate that the information network in the YREB is dominated by several highly developed core city clusters. However, the inherently closed structure resulting from these characteristics may not be sufficiently counterbalanced by low disassortativity. Under sudden disturbances, such a structural configuration may exhibit limited adaptability, delayed response capacity, and slow reorganization and learning processes, thereby weakening structural resilience. This study provides a deeper understanding of intercity relationships within the YREB and offers policy implications for enhancing structural resilience across the Yangtze River Basin.