Resilience of rural communities is becoming increasingly important to contemporary society. In this study we used a quantitative method to measure the resilience regulating ability of rural communities close to urban areas-in Licheng Subdistrict, Guangzhou City, China. The main results are as follows: (1) Rural systems close to urban areas display superior adapting and learning abilities and have a stronger overall resilience strength, the spatial distribution of which is characterized by dispersion in whole and aggregation in part; (2) the resilience of most rural economic subsystems can reach moderate or higher levels with apparent spatial agglomeration, whilst the ecological subsystem resilience and social resilience are generally weaker; the spatial distribution of the former shows a greater regional difference while the latter is in a layered layout; (3) some strategies such as rebuilding a stable ecological pattern, making use of urban resources and cultivating rural subjectivity are proposed on this basis, in order to promote the sustainable development of rural areas and realize rural revitalization. This work also gives suggestion for the creation of appropriate and effective resilience standards specifically targeted for rural community-aiming to achieve the delivery of local sustainability goals.
Keywords: adaptive cycle; resilience; rural community; rural revitalization; social-ecological system; sustainability.