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

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.