Public health events have a massive impact on the safety of people's lives and the sustainable development of cities. It is helpful for planning and constructing resilient cities to clarify the action paths among the influencing elements of urban resilience and identify the critical factors. To address this gap, the primary goal of this research is to take Jiangsu Province as an example, based on the ISM model and a complex network, to identify the critical factors of urban resilience under public health events. Initially, a meta-analysis of the relevant literature was conducted to separate 23 influencing elements of urban resilience under public health events into six categories. Furthermore, the urban panel data of Jiangsu Province from 2000 to 2019 were selected as the original data. A complex network model was developed with the help of the mutual influence relationships among the influencing elements, and an explanatory structure model was applied to draw the hierarchical directed graph of the network. Thus, three action paths with direct, indirect, and fundamental effects on urban resilience and the hierarchy importance identification division were obtained. Finally, this paper identified the critical factors of urban resilience from two aspects of node-local and network global, including economic resilience, emergency communication capabilities, and government investment in disaster response. These critical factors can provide strategic support for cities to respond to public health events and effectively enhance urban resilience.

urban resilience; critical factors; meta-analysis; ISM model; complex network