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Transformative resilience of Wuhan’s city-center main streets in the post-COVID era

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 378–389 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Main streets in city centers are struggling to stay afloat in the post-COVID era, as digital technologies continue to proliferate rapidly in retail. Here we examine the socioeconomic and spatial transformation of Jiang Han Road in Wuhan’s city center, aiming to understand the capacity of city-center main streets for fostering resilience and urban transition after the pandemic. Leveraging adaptive resilience and urban transformation theories with various qualitative and spatial data, we reveal two key features that suggest transformative resilience. First is a ‘regime shift’, exhibited by the focus of the retail landscape transitioning from the pedestrian/urban experience to a reinvented urban experience increasingly geared to socialization in the digital world. Second is a strong ‘adaptive capacity’, cocreated by multiscalar pedestrian mobility, shop mix, and complex ownership and control arrangements. Through such transformative resilience of city-center main streets, a digitized urban future with novel forms of reality and sense of place is emerging.

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Fig. 1: Emerging retail landscape.
Fig. 2: Number and distribution of shops: 2016 versus 2022.
Fig. 3: Murder mystery game clubs and shop mix.
Fig. 4: Access, ownership/control, and appropriation.
Fig. 5: Pedestrian mobility and retail agglomerations.
Fig. 6: Transformative resilience of central-city main street: A conceptual diagram.

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Data availability

The base maps used for the spatial analysis were prepared by the authors, through extensive editing of the base maps manually drawn according to Baidu Maps and generated with a spatial dataset from Beijing City Lab in QGIS. The business establishment data (2016 and 2022) of the study area were originally from Amap.com, retrieved by two data crawling tools: LocoySpider and Octoparse. The above data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant for Young Scholars from the Ministry of Education of China (21YJCZH121; F.R.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42301209; F.R.), the Shanghai Pujiang Program (23PJC061; F.R.) and the Bureau of Urban Planning and Natural Resources of Shanghai (Ghzy-2023-GX08; F.R.). The research network extending an ongoing collaboration between the University of Melbourne, Wuhan Design Consultation Group and Shanghai Jiao Tong University helped organize the research team and conduct the fieldwork.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture, School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Fujie Rao, Yijun Kong & Dayi Lai

  2. China Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Fujie Rao

  3. School of Urban Design, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China

    Haijuan Zhao

  4. Wuhan Design Consultation Group, Wuhan, Hubei, China

    Haijuan Zhao

  5. Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Sun Sheng Han

  6. School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Tingting Lu

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Contributions

F.R. and H.Z. designed the research and collected the data. F.R., H.Z. and Y.K. performed the data analysis. D.L. and T.L. contributed to polishing the analytical results. F.R. and S.S.H. contributed to conceptualizing, writing and revising the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Fujie Rao.

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Nature Cities thanks Renia Ehrenfeucht, Xiaohua Zhong and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Rao, F., Zhao, H., Han, S.S. et al. Transformative resilience of Wuhan’s city-center main streets in the post-COVID era. Nat Cities 1, 378–389 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00063-3

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