Urban Industrial Innovation and Resilience-oriented Regional Transformation
Date:
December 29th, 2025 (UTC+8)
Organizer:
Nanjing Normal University
Symposium Chair:
Personal Bio:
Dr. Hu Xiaohui is a Professor at Nanjing Normal University and holds a PhD in Economic Geography (2015) from Kiel University, Germany. He worked as postdoctoral fellow at Hong Kong Baptist University and the University of Lethbridge, Canada. His research integrates Evolutionary Economic Geography and Transition Studies. He has led three national-level projects (NSFC, NSSF), two international grants (British Academy + World Resources Institute). He has published over 100 publications in economic geography and urban studies journals, including more than 30 SSCI/SCI papers. He serves on the editorial boards of the SSCI journal Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, and the Sage journal Transactions in Energy and Sustainability.
Symposium Members:
| Associate Professor Dongzhen Jie | Hangzhou Normal University | jiedz@126.com |
| Associate Professor Xu Huang | Nanjing Normal University | 09432@njnu.edu.cn |
| Associate Professor Qianqian Liu | Nanjing Normal University | 09430@njnu.edu.cn |
Call for Papers
Background:
The transition to a post-industrial era and escalating climate risks poses dual challenges to both traditional urban industrial regions and newly emerged high-tech regions as innovative niches. for one thing, historically reliant on labor-intensive, fossil energy-based manufacturing, these areas often face economic volatility, environmental degradation, and social inequity. For the other, newly emerging niches are also vulnerable, lacking strong endogenous resilience capability to address external social-economic and political challenges. The concept of "resilience" has thus become paramount, moving beyond mere recovery to fostering adaptive capacity against economic shocks and physical disruptions. Concurrently, the wave of innovation—driven by digitalization, green technologies, and advanced manufacturing—offers unprecedented opportunities. This background frames the critical need for a resilience-oriented regional transformation, which integrates industrial innovation to diversify economies, revitalize urban fabric, and build sustainable, future-proof industries, firms and communities capable of thriving in an uncertain world.
Goal / Rationale:
This symposium aims to address the resilience of old and new industrial urban regions, which remain locked in or struggled with obsolete economic structures, making them highly susceptible to global supply chain disruptions, market uncertainties, and institutional-political change impacts. The core problem is a lack of integrated strategies that simultaneously foster technological innovation and build systemic resilience. While innovation policies often prioritize growth in isolated tech sectors, and resilience planning focuses on physical infrastructure, this bifurcated approach fails to generate transformative, inclusive regional change. Our goal is to bridge this gap by developing a holistic framework for resilience-oriented regional transformation. We will investigate how recent advances—such as the application of AI and IoT for smart infrastructure, the rise of the circular and bio-economy, and novel multi-stakeholder governance models like living labs—can be synergistically leveraged. The ultimate objective is to provide actionable pathways for these regions to diversify their economies, decarbonize their industrial base, and enhance adaptive capacity, thereby securing a prosperous and sustainable future.
Scope and Information for Participants:
This symposium defines its scope around developing integrated strategies for resilience-oriented transformation in industrial regions. Key research themes include:
- Novel multi-stakeholder governance of social, economic and political resilience and policy frameworks for managing transition complexities at/cross urban and regional scales.
- The application of AI, IoT, and digital twins in enhancing infrastructure resilience and enabling smart, adaptive management for both old and emerging new industries and districts
- Pathways for fostering a circular and bioeconomy (or any new and cutting-edge industries in the making) to diversify economies and decarbonize the industrial base.
- digital platforms, digitalization, and digital economies for the transformation of old industries and regions.
- just transitions, social inclusion, and geographies of transitions for the understanding of long-term resilience and transformation of regions and cities
