Urbanization is a continuous process for a city’s economic development. Though rapid urbanization provides a huge employment opportunity for people, urban threats also increase proportionately due to natural and man-made hazards. Understanding urban resilience and sustainability is an urgent matter to face hazards in the rapidly urbanized world. Therefore, this study aims to clarify the concept and develop key indications of urban resilience and sustainability from the existing literature. A systematic literature review guided by PRISMA has been conducted using literature from 1 January 2001 to 30 November 2021. It argues that sustainability and resilience are interrelated paradigms that emphasize a system’s capacity to move toward desirable development paths. Resilience and sustainability are fundamentally concerned with preserving societal health and well-being within the context of a broader framework of environmental change. There are significant differences in their emphasis and time scales, particularly in the context of urbanization. This study has identified key indicators of urban resilience under three major components like adaptive capacity (education, health, food, and water), absorptive capacity (community support, urban green space, protective infrastructure, access to transport), and transformative capacity (communication technology, collaboration of multi-stakeholders, emergency services of government, community-oriented urban planning). This study also identified several indicators under major dimensions (social, economic, and environmental) of urban sustainability. The findings will be fruitful in understanding the dynamics of urban vulnerability and resilience and its measurement and management strategy from developed indicators.

Cooperation between government and social capital is an important starting point in the supply-side reform of public services. It is also an effective practice in public governance innovation. Based on policy diffusion theory and event history analysis (EHA), this study analyzes panel data from 282 mainland prefecture-level cities in China from 2004–2020 to explore public–private partnerships’ critical diffusion factors. The study reveals that motivation factors, resource/obstacle factors, and external factors affect government and social capital cooperation policies to different extents. The main driving forces for local governments to adopt these policies are population size, level of economic development, government financial resources, the learning mechanism, and the imitation mechanism. This study proposes the following arguments: firstly, that the ultimate goal of policy innovation is to solve social contradictions and meet public demand; secondly, that economic resources can help to adopt policy innovation and proper diffusion; thirdly, that the public–private partnership (PPP) model has been continuously developed by using experience from other projects or cities through a learning mechanism; and finally, that policy publicity and public opinion expressed via the mainstream media are not only an inducement for policy innovation and diffusion, but also a powerful guarantee. The experience of local governments in China can help to verify whether the “positive factors” that are traditionally considered to be conducive to the cooperation between the government and social capital are effective, and to reveal the internal logic of the innovation diffusion of public policies of local governments in China from a more multidimensional perspective.