Objective The increasing frequency of environmental changes and natural disasters has intensified pressures and disturbances on urban systems, making the development of “resilient city” a key focus in global spatial governance and risk prevention. Leveraging scientific methods to plan and construct resilient cities, enhance the resilience of human settlement systems, and explore mechanisms for achieving resilient urban and rural development has become a consensus among academia, industry, and governments in response to urban disaster risk prevention and control. In recent years, frequent crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the Ahr Valley floods in 2021 have significantly advanced Germany’s theoretical and practical approaches to resilient city construction. “Resilient city” gradually became a core concept in German urban master planning during the latter half of the 2010s. Analyzing the theoretical hotspots and practical experience of resilient city construction in Germany can provide theoretical foundations and practical guidance for the systematic integration and action-oriented refinement of resilient city development and governance in China.

Methods Based on the Web of Science database, this research employs bibliometric analysis and visualization to examine publications on resilient cities in Germany spanning the period from 2010 to 2025. Based on a timeline analysis of 239 publications and a keyword hotspot analysis, the research and practical progress in Germany’s resilient city construction are summarized.

Results The results of timeline and keyword frequency analysis reveal that research on resilient cities in Germany is relatively limited in quantity and mainly concentrated in the period from 2010 to 2019. However, since 2019, academic interest has grown steadily, with a peak in publications between 2021 and June 2025, accounting for 73% of the total publications over the 15-year period. Keyword analysis highlights that climate-related terms such as climate change, climate change adaptation, and climate resilience appear most frequently. Urban sustainability also ranks highly, reflecting the mainstream influence of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which place “resilience” and “sustainability” on equal footing. Additionally, terms commonly used to describe resilience characteristics, such as vulnerability and adaptation, are prominent, indicating strong academic focus on the attributes of resilience in the German context. These clues may serve as entry points for analyzing Germany’s theoretical and practical progress in resilient city development.

Conclusion Against the backdrop that “sustainable development” has long served as the dominant theme in German urban policy, the interpretation of “resilience” in German academia involves a conceptual distinction from “sustainability”. Resilience complements the sustainability notion that future problems can be preventively addressed by treating uncertainties, surprises, or disasters as “permanent companions of humanity” and preparing for them through continuous learning. The core definition of the concept of “resilient city” can be summarized as the robustness, redundancy, diversity, flexibility and other resilience characteristics of various urban elements in supporting system operations during crises or disasters, as well as the recovery and innovative learning capabilities in maintaining basic system functions and urban resident life. Furthermore, German academia incorporates diverse perspectives in defining the basic scope of resilience characteristics and the delineation of resilience planning and governance cycles. To address the complexity, vulnerability, and uncertainties of cities in a risk society, it is essential to enhance decentralized economic and infrastructure systems, natural systems (“hardware environment”), efficient and rapid response mechanisms, cross-sectoral planning and collaborative governance (“soft power”), as well as the crisis response capabilities of individuals and organizations within urban systems — such as social networks and trust relationships — to minimize disruption duration and strengthen the ability to cope with sudden disasters or crises. The Memorandum “Urbane Resilienz — Wege zur robusten, adaptiven und zukunftsfähigen Stadt” (the “Memorandum”), adopted at the 14th Federal Conference on Urban Development Policy in 2021, spurred broad discussions on the resilience concept, prompting some cities to integrate resilience into urban development plans and formulate related policies and action plans. Several cities have launched pilot projects, exploring infrastructure resilience, climate resilience, and social resilience, thereby accumulating valuable experience. However, overall, sudden crises and disasters have been the direct drivers prompting local governments in Germany to shift their mindset and explore “resilience” development pathways. Research projects and funding programs have been a major avenue for introducing resilience themes into German urban and landscape planning. Based on Germany’s experiences and challenges in resilient city construction, several recommendations for China’s resilient city construction are proposed as follows. 1) Develop targeted action guidelines and standard systems for resilient cities at the top strategic design level; 2) strengthen full-cycle resilient city construction by creating refined, precise, and comprehensive city-wide risk maps to help government departments clearly understand uncertain risks across different times and locations, improve the scientificity and effectiveness of prevention and early warning, and explore pathways for full-cycle resilient city development; and 3) enhance interdisciplinary and cross-departmental collaboration to promote goal-coordinated and systematic resilient city construction.