Digital and Culture: Towards More Resilient Urban Community Governance

Urban communities are characterized by significant population size, high density, and strong mobility. While we might enjoy the dividends of rapid modernization, there are nonetheless variable and frequent public crises that occur. Modernization’s problems are gradually emerging, and the traditional risk prevention logic that relies on administrative “rigidity” has begun to be widely challenged. Traditional urban communities depend on institutional, structural, and spatial aspects to improve community resilience. Because big data has become popular, attention has begun to be paid to digital empowerment and community resilience. However, the emergence of problems such as “digital paradox” and “digital ethics” in the digital realm itself has prompted calls for cultural resilience to continue to rise. Therefore, urgently needed resolutions are required to questions regarding the resilience of traditional communities, the construction of digital and cultural resilience, the relationship between digital and cultural resilience, and the manner in which cultural resilience is coordinated to solve the problem of digital resilience. A quantitative analysis of 350 questionnaires from five urban communities found that these communities’ institutional, spatial, and structural dimensions are the driving factors for improving resilience. In contrast, the cultural and digital dimensions are constraints. Therefore, the question of how to coordinate the cultural and digital factors represented by traditional and modern societies in order to compensate for the shortcomings in resilience construction is that which future urban communities must consider. The authors of this study believe that digital empowerment is needed to open up the “first mile” of resilient communities, that cultural empowerment is required to break down the “blocks in the middle” of resilient communities, and that digital and cultural coupling is needed to link the “last mile” of resilient communities. One must use culture to compensate for the shortcomings of digital resilience and digital to pay for the failures of cultural resilience before one can move towards more resilient urban community governance.