Editorial: Urban resilience and inclusive development

1 Introduction

Urban and regional development across the globe is increasingly shaped by profound and persistent uncertainty. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, cities and regions have been exposed to cascading short- and long-term shocks that continue to disrupt social, economic, and institutional systems (Glaeser, 2022). These shocks include, but are not limited to, public health crises, climate-induced extreme events, geopolitical tensions, supply-chain disruptions, and the growing fragility of governance institutions. Together, they have significantly complicated efforts toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly those related to poverty reduction, health equity, sustainable cities, and social inclusion (Bautista-Puig et al., 2022).

Importantly, such shocks do not unfold evenly across space or society. Rather than acting as temporary disturbances, they intersect with historically embedded inequalities—of class, gender, age, ethnicity, and location—producing highly differentiated development trajectories across countries, cultures, and governance systems, as well as between urban and rural areas (Leal Filho et al., 2020). Contemporary societies are thus not only unequal, but also spatially variegated in how risks are distributed, experienced, and managed. Vulnerability and resilience are co-produced through long-standing socio-spatial arrangements, institutional capacities, and uneven access to resources and opportunities.

Within this context, the resilience and sustainability of urban and rural areas have become central concepts in both scholarly debates and policy practice (Li et al., 2024; Zhang and Li, 2018). A substantial body of literature has examined resilience in cities and rural regions alike, often focusing on physical infrastructure, environmental performance, technological innovation, or economic recovery. These approaches have generated valuable insights, particularly in relation to disaster risk reduction, climate adaptation, and infrastructure robustness. Yet, an enduring research gap remains in the social dimension of resilience and sustainability–namely, whether development pathways and resilience-building efforts are inclusively experienced, and for whom they actually work.

Long-standing critiques asking “resilience of what, to what, and for whom” continue to challenge the operationalisation of resilience in real-world planning and governance (Meerow and Newell, 2019). Without explicit attention to social differentiation and human needs, resilience risks becoming a technocratic or depoliticized concept, one that prioritizes system stability over social justice, and efficiency over equity.

This Research Topic is positioned squarely within these debates, with a particular emphasis on inclusive development and human needs as critical lenses through which resilience and sustainability can be rethought. By bringing together empirical and review-based contributions from diverse developing contexts—Indonesia, Israel, and China—the Research Topic underscores that development remains a primary concern for much of the Global South. At the same time, it reminds us that resilience and inclusive development cannot be treated as an abstract or universal solution, but must be grounded in place-specific social realities, institutional arrangements, and lived experiences.

Collectively, the four articles foreground a fundamental question that lies at the heart of contemporary debates on resilient and sustainable development: what are the real human needs that future development should address? Framing resilience through an inclusive, human-centered perspective reconnects current discussions with seminal ideas such as the “right to the city” (Harvey, 2003; Yang et al., 2023) while also engaging with economic interpretations of development that distinguish between needs, demands, and the uneven supply of resources and opportunities.

From this perspective, resilience is not merely a technical capacity to absorb shocks, bounce back, or return to a prior equilibrium. Rather, it is deeply entangled with how societies recognize, prioritize, and satisfy diverse human needs across different social groups and spatial contexts. Human needs are neither universal nor static; they are socially constructed, culturally embedded, and shaped by institutional arrangements and power relations. What constitutes safety, accessibility, participation, or wellbeing varies across age groups, genders, income levels, and territorial settings.

Inclusive development thus becomes a necessary condition for meaningful resilience. Without equity, participation, and social justice, resilience-building efforts risk reinforcing existing vulnerabilities or creating new forms of exclusion. Infrastructure investments may benefit already privileged populations; smart-city technologies may marginalize those lacking digital access; and spatial restructuring may displace vulnerable communities in the name of efficiency or competitiveness (Chen et al., 2025; Keep et al., 2021). By foregrounding human needs, this Research Topic shifts the analytical focus from abstract systems to lived experiences, and from aggregate outcomes to differentiated impacts.

2 Overview of contributions

The four articles in this Research Topic offer complementary insights drawn from diverse methodological approaches and empirical settings. Together, they respond to a shared concern with human needs under the sustainable development agenda, while illustrating how inclusion–or its absence–shapes development outcomes and resilience capacities.

Subanti et al. examine the construction of aging-friendly cities in Indonesia, a country facing rapid demographic transition alongside persistent regional inequality. Integrating hedonic price modeling with a dataset covering 98 cities, they demonstrate how access to health facilities, safe transportation, communication infrastructure, and low crime rates jointly enhance quality-of-life values that encourage older adults to age in place rather than migrate. Major metropolitan areas such as Bandung, Surabaya, and Jakarta perform relatively well, while peripheral and frontier towns continue to marginalize senior populations.

Importantly, the study reframes elderly residents not as dependents, but as a form of “living capital.” Their continued presence stabilizes property markets, sustains local economies, preserves community memory, and supports informal care networks—social assets that enhance urban resilience in the face of demographic aging, epidemics, and care-system pressures. By aligning urban infrastructure and services with demographic change, the paper offers an inclusive development pathway that transforms longevity from a perceived fiscal burden into a socio-economic dividend.

Alsayed provides a panoramic synthesis of 42 years of scholarship on human needs and urban form. Through bibliometric analysis and VOSviewer mapping, she reveals how smart-city narratives and technology-driven approaches have increasingly overshadowed human-centered planning traditions. In response, she proposes an Urban Human Needs (UHN) framework that replaces Maslow's hierarchical pyramid with a networked, culturally sensitive matrix of twelve interlocking needs, including subsistence, health, identity, creativity, participation, and justice.

These needs are systematically linked to urban elements such as buildings, mobility systems, open spaces, digital infrastructure, and governance mechanisms. The framework enables planners and policymakers to identify who is served, who is excluded, and why. The paper argues that satisfying plural and context-specific human needs is the missing link between humanitarian aspirations and resilient outcomes: cities rich in social capital, diversity, and solidarity are better equipped to cope with and recover from environmental, economic, and health-related shocks.

Zhang et al. focus on rural–urban restructuring in X County, Zhejiang Province, a mountainous region undergoing rapid industrial spill-over and spatial transformation. Employing entropy-weighted TOPSIS methods and GIS analysis, they assess the coupling coordination between economic, social, and ecological development and the spatial reorganization of production, living, and ecological spaces over two decades. Their findings reveal a non-linear transformation trajectory–from homogeneous dispersion to differentiated, high-performance clusters–that shifts the county from severe disorder to good coordination.

The study demonstrates that inclusive resilience is not exclusive to large cities. When spatial restructuring aligns with livelihood diversification, ecological compensation, and cultural branding, rural regions can achieve revitalization without sacrificing equity or environmental integrity. This staged pathway provides a valuable reference for developing regions facing population mobility, climate pressures, and land-use constraints under conditions of structural transition.

Rotem-Mindali et al. deliver a detailed equity assessment of Israel's inter-city rail expansion. By mapping 61 rail stations and nearly 18,000 feeder-bus stops, they construct an accessibility index that incorporates both distance and service frequency, overlaying it with socio-economic and ethno-religious data. Despite substantial national investment since 2000, Arab towns and ultra-Orthodox women, groups with low car ownership, remain poorly served by feeder networks.

The absence of last-mile connectivity amplifies opportunity gaps, constrains female labor participation, and concentrates resilience benefits in already advantaged areas. The study cautions that infrastructure-led resilience strategies, if not paired with adaptive and inclusive service provision, may deepen spatial injustice and erode the social cohesion upon which collective resilience depends.

3 Concluding remarks and future directions

Taken together, these contributions advance the literature on inclusive sustainable development by illustrating how development challenges and outcomes manifest differently across global contexts, sectors, and population groups. They collectively emphasize human needs, equity, and social differentiation as central to understanding contemporary development processes and resilience-building efforts.

At the same time, the Research Topic also reveals important avenues for future research. While resilience is implicitly present across the articles, it has yet to be fully developed as an explicit analytical lens. Future studies may therefore ask how resilience and resilient planning can be systematically incorporated into aging societies; whether resilience itself constitutes a human need or a critical factor shaping individual and collective decision-making; and how resilience frameworks can inform urban–rural development under national strategies such as China's resilient city agenda (Ji et al., 2026). Further questions also arise around collective resilience and equity in transport, housing, and other infrastructure systems, particularly in contexts marked by social diversity and institutional complexity. Addressing these questions will require interdisciplinary approaches, mixed methods, and closer engagement with communities whose needs are often underrepresented in planning processes.

By raising these questions, this Research Topic aims not to close debates, but to reopen them. It invites scholars and practitioners to further interrogate how resilience, inclusion, and sustainability can be co-produced in ways that are socially just, spatially sensitive, and responsive to the diverse human needs that will define future development trajectories.

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