Evaluating multilevel resilience of Russian urban economies 2010–2019

Abstract

In this paper we examine the coevolution of individual cities and the city networks to which they belong, during an economic shock. We take an individual city and its city network to be the meso and macro levels, respectively, of a social-economic system. Focusing on the economic shocks felt by Russian cities in 2014 following the Ukrainian conflict, we demonstrate that the same shock had different effects at the meso level (a city’s employment structure) and macro level (a city’s interfirm linkages to other cities, both national and international). To explain our findings, we draw on panarchy theory to propose a multilevel perspective of resilience through the coevolution of adaptive cycles at the meso and macro levels of urban economies. To evaluate resilience at each level, we first operationalize the panarchy concept of connectedness using a previously developed metric called “tightness,” which quantifies the interdependencies among economic activities. We next operationalize the panarchy concept of potential by measuring a city’s degree of economic specialization. At the meso level, we find that larger cities suffered less employment loss than smaller cities during the shock and that by 2019 the structure of the meso level had largely returned to its 2010 structure. On the other hand, at the macro level, we found that the 2019 macro level structure changed considerably from 2010. Thus, we show that the meso level was disturbed but returned to a previous state (engineering resilience) while the macro level transitioned to a new state (ecological resilience). Results suggest that policy makers would benefit from distinguishing between the meso and macro levels, enabling the development of multilevel urban policies to address future shocks.

Keywords

• cities
• employment
• multilevel
• multinational firms
• panarchy
• resilience
• russia
• system of cities