本文在回顾国内外城市防灾减灾实践的基础上，指出以“恢复”能力建设为目标的抗灾韧性城市建设理论在指导我国城市巨灾防控方面存在“先天”缺陷，亟需建立新的城市防灾减灾理论；新理论应在全面纳入“预防 ‒ 应急 ‒ 恢复 ‒ 学习”4个灾害应对阶段的基础上，实现超越城市设防水准的极端灾害作用下灾害防控“保底线”的目标。为此，借鉴人体免疫学思想，提出了抗灾免疫城市建设理论，将城市视为“生命体”，将抗灾免疫防御机制分为固有、适应性、记忆3个免疫层级。在可能的各种历史记忆“病毒”侵入时，能够保障代表城市“生命体”基本“生命体征”的城市关键运行功能维持在可接受水平之上的固有免疫机制，应是核心建设目标；系统的记忆免疫防御机制，形成贯穿于整个灾害应对过程并动态体现于下一个灾害应对循环，是系统灾害经验总结学习成果的反映。城市抗灾免疫理论与抗灾韧性理论的主要区别在于，前者明确了对城市关键运行功能维持可接受水平的鲁棒性分析架构以及系统优化和子系统之间协同的目标。城市抗灾免疫理论与抗灾风险理论的不同之处在于，前者将城市关键运行功能的概率风险控制问题转化为系统基本运行功能可接受的阈值问题。

A review of disaster prevention and mitigation practices in China and abroad reveals that resilience-based approaches, which prioritize post-disaster recovery capabilities, have inherent limitations in guiding China’s urban disaster prevention and control. Therefore, it is urgent to build a new theoretical framework that can integrate all four stages of disaster response: prevention, response, recovery, and learning, thereby maintaining essential urban functions under extreme events that exceed a city’s designed defense capacity. Drawing inspiration from human immunology, this study proposes a theory of disaster-immune cities. In this framework, cities are conceptualized as living organisms with disaster resistance and immune defense mechanisms categorized into three levels: innate, adaptive, and memory. The inherent immune mechanism should serve as the core objective of urban resilience construction. This mechanism ensures that key urban operational functions—representing the fundamental vital signs of the city as living organisms—are maintained at an acceptable level when confronted with various "viruses” of historical memory intrusions. The memory immune defense mechanism dynamically operates throughout the entire disaster response process and manifests in subsequent disaster cycles, reflecting the system’s accumulated experience, adaptation, and learning outcomes. The key distinction between the theory of urban disaster immunity and the resilience theory is its explicit framework for robustness analysis, which ensures the maintenance of critical urban functions at acceptable levels, along with its emphasis on system optimization and coordination among subsystems. Compared with risk-based theory, the immunity-based approach shifts the focus from probabilistic risk control of critical urban functions to defining and safeguarding threshold levels for the essential operational functions of the system.