Objective Against the backdrop of intensifying global climate change, interlaced disaster risks, and ongoing urbanization, county-level units have gradually emerged as a key platform for new urbanization. They constitute fundamental spatial units for coordinating territorial spatial safety and development, as well as implementing disaster governance and emergency management. Oriented toward "safety and resilience" — a critical objective for urban-rural development in the new era — planning guidance has evolved across multiple dimensions and comprehensive chains, spanning systemic risk response, spatial pattern optimization, and resource allocation.
Methods Following the approach of "experience consolidation − framework construction − pathway exploration," and using the planning case of Suning County, Hebei Province as a reference, this study summarizes the key priorities and challenges in county-level territorial spatial master plans under safety and resilience goals. It outlines the conceptual framework and structure for plan formulation, proposing integrated strategies for planning and implementation across three dimensions: disaster-resistant spatial optimization, disaster prevention resource allocation, and emergency response mechanisms.
Results 1) The evolution of safety-resilience-oriented planning practice unfolds through three progressive phases: initially, in the foundational phase, planning focused on single-hazard-specific initiatives targeting physical damages from earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters, aiming for "loss minimization during disasters" through engineering standard enhancements, facility layout optimization, and containment zoning to bolster resistance capacities at localized points; subsequently, the developmental phase shifted toward integrated disaster prevention planning, expanding perspectives from natural hazards to multi-risk scenarios, extending goals from loss reduction to "rapid post-disaster recovery," and scaling interventions from isolated controls to systemic collaborations—formulating strategies through multi-hazard risk assessments from a "systemic resilience" lens; ultimately, the integration phase embeds safety-resilience principles systemically into territorial spatial planning, upgrading objectives to "pre-disaster risk anticipation, functional maintenance during disasters, and swift post-disaster restoration" while expanding spatial coverage to comprehensive territorial network systems, thereby crystallizing a multi-tiered resilience planning framework. 2) Guided by safety-resilience principles, county-level planning serves as the pivotal tier bridging strategic vision and implementation within the territorial spatial planning system, tasked with both implementing higher-level development-conservation strategies and land-use regulations while guiding lower-tier plans’ formulation and spatial governance execution. In disaster-bearing spatial configuration, it demonstrates transitional adaptability by translating macro spatial strategies into actionable resilience networks; regarding disaster prevention elements, it addresses infrastructure limitations and rural vulnerabilities through multifunctional infrastructure integration; and for disaster response, it prioritizes operational practicality by emphasizing long-term adaptive execution throughout dynamic implementation cycles. 3) The value-driven objective of safety and resilience prioritizes enhancing adaptive capacity and synergistic co-benefits within planning systems when confronting uncertain disruptions, advocating for a holistic ’all-domain, all-element, whole-process’ systemic response to disaster risks to collectively elevate the resilience threshold of urban-rural systems. Within territorial spatial master planning, this objective materializes through three integrated dimensions—configurational resilience, systemic resilience, and processual resilience—which respectively govern three critical components: spatial optimization of disaster-bearing environments, allocation of disaster-prevention elements, and implementation mechanisms for disaster response. By proactively refining county-level spatial patterns, strategically mobilizing urban-rural development resources, and iteratively upgrading disaster response protocols, this framework systematically strengthens the resilience capacity of territorial spaces. 4) County-level territorial spatial master planning integrates three core technical approaches: firstly, optimizing disaster-bearing spatial configurations through zoned and tiered risk partitioning combined with resilient network connectivity, where precise identification of spatial risk heterogeneity enables refined zoning and tiered risk units to generate risk maps, scenarios, and inventories as spatial decision-making tools, while strengthening ecological corridors and emergency passages to actively adapt spatial patterns to comprehensive risk cognition; secondly, configuring disaster prevention elements via dual-use systems with multi-tiered ordering, which maximizes self-organization, autonomous operation, and self-recovery capacities of complex urban-rural systems by functionally integrating and converting blue-green-gray infrastructures for everyday-emergency dual purposes, and deploying differentiated elements across regional-cluster-community tiers to deeply couple development resources with safety demands; thirdly, implementing disaster response measures through adaptive implementation with risk-pooling mechanisms, where planning execution bridges pre-disaster warnings, emergency responses, post-disaster recovery, and iterative learning via phased quantitative assessments to transform strategies into tangible resilience tasks, while cross-sectoral and interregional risk-pooling allocates resources and liabilities to ensure continuous evolution of resilience capacities throughout the planning lifecycle.
Conclusion Safety-resilience-oriented county-level territorial spatial master planning serves as a critical operational vehicle for addressing complex disaster risks and implementing territorial space security mandates, while simultaneously functioning as both the foundational safety baseline and vulnerability focal point for risk governance and emergency management execution. Embedding the core values of safety and resilience into urban-rural development and spatial planning enhances resilience capacities by optimizing structural relationships and operational mechanisms among system elements. This not only provides actionable pathways for systematically elevating risk prevention capabilities and spatial resilience thresholds at the county scale but fundamentally integrates safety resilience into the DNA of territorial space development, protection, and utilization—ultimately advancing the transformation of county-level master planning from conventional approaches toward resilience-oriented paradigms.
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