Based on the evolutionary theory of urban systems, the thesis argues that cities' resilience is shaped by the synchronicities of different processes on three urban levels: macro focuses on inter-urban flows creating a system of cities; micro focuses on the behavior of individual and collective urban actors; and meso, considering a city as an integrated system between micro and macro. Every level of urban processes has a different adaptation path following diverse shocks, and we argue that synchronicities of these multilevel adaptive dynamics create urban resilience (Rogov, Rozenblat, 2020).
Considering the economic shocks of 2014 of a top-down nature, the thesis starts with the construction of inter-urban networks of multinational firms. Using the ORBIS-BvD database on the 3,000 largest corporate networks, the inter-urban linkages were constructed. The firms, both headquarters and subsidiaries, were located in the delimited Large Urban Regions (LUR), encompassing over 80% of all the firms located in Russia. Using the datasets for 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019 we wondered how the relative position of Russian cities in the global economic networks changed before, during, and after the economic crisis of 2014-2016.