Regional integration, as a critical national strategic policy and a mechanism to drive regional development and cooperation in China, can effectively stimulate urban development and enhance urban competitiveness. Therefore, investigating the impact of regional integration on urban resilience provides valuable insights for further improving cities’ abilities to cope with diverse risks.

This paper employs a multi-period DID approach to examine the impact of regional integration, with a focus on urban cluster planning as a form of quasi-natural experiment, on the level of urban resilience. The research explores the heterogeneity and mechanisms of this impact. The findings reveal that: (1) Regional integration significantly enhances the level of urban resilience. (2) The effectiveness of regional integration in improving urban resilience is more pronounced in the eastern regions, super-large cities, and polycentric cities. (3) Regional integration enhances urban economic resilience through the structural optimization effect, and urban economic resilience and social resilience through the diversity effect. However, it weakens urban ecological resilience through the scale effect and has no significant impact on urban engineering resilience. Importantly, the enhancing effect of regional integration on urban economic resilience and social resilience outweighs its weakening effect on urban ecological resilience.

This paper makes several potential contributions: First, by integrating the essence of resilience, a comprehensive and scientifically sound indicator system for urban resilience is constructed across four dimensions. Second, by taking multiple national-level city clusters as the research object, regional integration and urban resilience are directly included in the same framework, enriching the relevant literature on this topic. Third, based on various dimensions of urban resilience, it investigates the mechanisms through which regional integration affects each dimension, providing empirical evidence and policy recommendations for the government to formulate regional integration strategies to promote urban development.