Sustainability assessment and key factors identification of first-tier cities in China

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Highlights

  • This paper evaluated the sustainability of 19 first-tier cities in China.

  • A SO-SRA method was proposed where weight reflects indicator sustainability.

  • Cites’ sustainability was not ideal, only 3 cities with performances above 0.5.

  • Nearly all cities (accounting for 94.7%) showed an optimistic development prospect.

  • More than half cities showed the poorest sustainability on the key factor, economy.

Abstract

Sustainability is a key issue should be considered in the process of urbanization construction. The sustainable development of cities plays an important role in increasing urbanization quality. The paper evaluated the sustainability level of 19 first-tier cities in China by selecting 18 indicators from economic, social and environmental systems. Since indicator is the basic unit of the measurement of urban sustainability, the sustainability was refined to the indicator level. Indicator sustainability was measured by the combination of its competitive and developing levels. In addition, a sustainability oriented sequential relationship analysis method was proposed to allocate more weight to the indicator with higher sustainable level. The assessment results indicate that the sustainable performances of the cities were not ideal, because only three cities, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Dongguan, had the average performances above 0.5. Besides Tianjin, all the cities showed an upward development trend in the year 2010–2018. It indicates the sustainability prospect of these cities is optimistic. It is found that economy had the strongest connection with cities’ sustainability. However, most of the cities showed the worst performance on economic sustainability. Combining the phenomenon of environmental decline in some cities, it is suggested to strengthen environmental protection while giving priority to economic development so as to realize the coordinated development between economy and environment.

Introduction

Urbanization is an important phenomenon in the development of human society. Over the past 70 years, China has completed rapid urbanization, with the urbanization rate increasing from 10.64% in 1949 to 59.58% in 2018, an average annual increase of 0.7 percentage points. The progress of urbanization promotes the accelerated development of economy and society, but also inevitably brings a serious of ecological environment problems (Fan and Fang, 2020), such as climate warming (Kirikkaleli and Sowah, 2020; Mauree et al., 2019), water and air pollution (Landa-Cansigno et al., 2020; Chiarini et al., 2020), great resource consumption (Yan et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2020), ecological destruction (Tan et al., 2018; Frondoni et al., 2011), etc. Given these problems, constructing a more sustainable urban future becomes a hot topic of recent studies in the literature (Tao et al., 2019; Zhang and Li, 2018).

Urban sustainability is a broad concept involving multiple dimensions (Steiniger et al., 2020). Albino et al. (2015) provided the interpretation of urban sustainability in a more anthropocentric approach, that is, cities should respond to people’s needs through sustainable solutions for social and economic aspects urban. Carli et al. (2013) pointed out that city sustainability, especially for smart city, should not only consider the physical infrastructure (e.g. public transport network capillarity), urban assets (e.g. green space share) and conditions of the general context (e.g. air quality) but also measure the citizens satisfaction and well-being (e.g. satisfaction with quality of schools, satisfaction with transparency of bureaucracy). Additionally, many researches (Tan and Lu, 2019; Gonzalez-Garcia et al., 2019) defined sustainable development of cities as the coordinated development of three key systems: economy, society, and environment. Economy provides important material guarantee for urban sustainability. Healthy ecological environment is a fundamental component of urban sustainability. Providing a harmonious and friendly social living environment for people is the ultimate target of city sustainable development. These three systems constitute the three pillars of urban sustainability (Costanza, 1993; Ali-Toudert and Ji, 2017).

Assessment measurement plays an important role in monitoring the construction level of urban sustainability. The assessment results could provide valuable suggestions or references to promote city sustainable development. Assessment of urban sustainability has attracted the research interest of many scholars (Dang et al., 2020; Meijering et al., 2018) in the recent decades. A widely accepted research model is about measuring urban sustainability using various indicators selected from different systems. Multi-indicator systems are gaining increasing attention because they are easily understood and allow a step implementation for each indicator (Berardi, 2015). In this case, the integration of indicators into a synthesized value, representing the comprehensive sustainable performance of a city, is the key issue.

In general, there are two types of approaches to obtain the comprehensive sustainable performance. One is about creating comprehensive rating systems for evaluating sustainability across the design, construction and operation stages (Diaz-Sarachaga et al., 2018). Many rating systems were proposed such as the total quality assessment (TQA) systems (Berardi, 2015), the life cycle assessment (Maranghi et al., 2020), Envision in USA (Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, 2020), civil engineering environmental quality (CEEQUAL) in UK (CEEQUAL., 2020) and infrastructure sustainable rating tool in Australia (Diaz-Sarachaga et al., 2018). The other is about constructing a comprehensive sustainability index by following the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) process (Carli et al., 2018; Zinatizadeh et al., 2017). The paper does the assessment measurement of urban sustainability by adopting the idea of MCDM. In this case, constructing the indicator systems, determining the indicator weights, and aggregating the associated indicator and weight values are the primary procedures of urban sustainability assessment. Although all the steps are important for the quality of assessment result, the weighting process seems to have the greatest impact (Li et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2012). Many weighting methods have been developed to calculate indicator weights. Tai et al. (2020) selected the entropy method to determine the indicator weight in the process of evaluating the sustainable development of coal mining cities. Hamurcu and Eren (2020) assessed the sustainability for urban transportation in Krkkale using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to calculate the weights of each sustainability criteria. Gonzalez-Garcia et al. (2019) chose the equal weight for the evaluation of sustainability of the municipalities of Galicia (northwest of Spain). Ngan et al. (2019) measured the dominance relationship of the sustainable indicator for promoting circular economy in developing countries, where the fuzzy analytics network process (FANP) was adopted to quantify the priority weights of sustainability indicators. Yi et al. (2019) used deviation maximization (DM) method to calculate indicator weights to highlight the overall difference among the sustainable performances of cities. Zhang et al. (2019) evaluated the water resource assets in Wuhan city, China, by the combination of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and entropy weight. Li et al. (2018) proposed an AHP-CV (coefficient of variation) combined weighting method to better evaluate the suitability of urban green space. Rad et al. (2018) used the analytical network process (ANP) and the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) methods to determine the indicator weights, reflecting the interaction between indicators, in the process of sustainable assessment of ubiquitous cities.

The weighting methods can be summarized to the following four primary aspects: (1) subjective weighting approach considering decision-maker’s preference attitude to different indicators, such as the AHP method; (2) objective weighting approach considering the performance difference among alternatives on a certain indicator, such as the entropy method, the deviation maximization (DM) method, and coefficient of variation (CV) method; (3) combination weighting approach, such as the AHP-entropy and the AHP-CV methods; (4) interactive weighting approach reflecting the interdependent relationship between indicators, such as the ANP method, and the combination of ANP and DEMATEL methods mentioned above.

The methods above incorporate various considerations (i.e. subjective preference, performance difference, and interaction relationship) into the weighting process, but give less consideration to the sustainable development of the indicators themselves. Sustainability at indicator level is causally related to the comprehensive performance of urban sustainability. For example, a city with all indicators showing sustainable development trend will present a better sustainability prospect. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the sustainable level of indicators in the process of determining weights. Generally, the indicator with higher sustainability should be assigned to larger weight to stimulate the sustainable development of cities. Under this consideration, this paper proposed a new weight method by the combination of indicators’ sustainable level and the sequential relationship analysis (SRA) method (Guo, 2007), denoted sustainability oriented SRA (SO-SRA) method for simplicity. The sustainable level of an indicator was determined by considering its development level and competition advantage simultaneously. The detailed procedures were shown in Subsection 2.3, not tired in words here.

The motivation of the paper is to develop a method to decompose city sustainability into indicators to analyze the reasons for satisfactory/unsatisfactory sustainable performances more completely. It is hoped that the research could enrich the evaluation method of urban sustainability, especially the weighting method. The purpose of the paper is to provide scientific and valuable references and suggestions for city planners or local authorities. As the primary decision maker or planner of city sustainable development, local authorities usually need to understand the development status of cities through the assessment conclusions and plan a better future for the cities based on the problems revealed by the assessment results. The academic contribution of the paper is the SO-SRA weighting method with the consideration of sustainable development at indicator level, which was given little concern in existing weighting methods. The scientific significance of analyzing the sustainability level of indicators in the weighting process is about stimulating the sustainable development of a city. The indicator with higher sustainability will receive higher weight. In this case, the city may try its best to improve the development level of indicators to highlight the role of dominant indicators in improving the assessment results.

The innovation of this paper lies in the fact that the analysis of the sustainable development of cities is concrete to the indicator level. That is, the indicator weight is determined by considering its sustainability level, and larger weight is given to the indicator showing better sustainability. Additionally, the discussion of sustainable performances of cities is not only at city level, but also at system level to identify the key impact factors related to cities’ comprehensive sustainability. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: (1) the indicator system is constructed from the economic, social and environmental dimensions; (2) the initial indicator values are collected and the sustainable level of each indicator is analyzed; (3) the indicator weight is determined by the SO-SRA method; (4) the sustainable performances of cities are calculated by using the simple linear weighted aggregation model; (5) the elaborate analysis of sustainable performances at city level and system level is further discussed, and the key impact factors related to sustainable development of cities are identified by using the grey relational analysis (GRA) method (Wu, 2002; Sun et al., 2020).

Section snippets

The research area

First-tier cities refer to the metropolises that play an important role in national political, economic, and other social activities and have the leading role and the ability to drive the development of radiation. There are four recognized first-tier cities in China, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Additionally, China Business Network Research Institute (CBNRI) ranks 337 cities at and above the prefecture level in China based on brand business data, user behavior data from

Measurement of sustainable performance

The paper measured the sustainable performances of the 19 first-tier cities from the year 2010–2018. The data of the indicators listed in Table 2 were collected from the China City Statistical Yearbook (2011–2019), Beijing Statistical Yearbook (2011–2019), Shanghai National Economic and Social Development Statistical Bulletin (2019), Shanghai Statistical Yearbook (2018), Guangdong Statistical Yearbook (2018–2019), Chengdu Statistical Yearbook (2018), Chongqing Statistical Yearbook (2018–2019),

Discussion

We assessed the sustainability of 19 first-tier cities and identified the key factors related to sustainable performance. It is found that the main reason for the nonideal sustainability of the cities was the unbalanced development of the three systems (see Fig. 3), especially the low level of economic sustainability. In the past decade, China was at a critical moment of economic restructuring and economic growth shifting. Under this background, the economic downturn was an inevitable

Conclusion and future prospects

Economy, society and environment are three important dimensions of urban sustainability. Many researches assessed urban sustainable development by integrating the indicator performances of the three systems. However, few studies have measured sustainability at indicator level. The manuscript defined the sustainable level of an indicator by the combination of its competitive and developing levels. Then, a SO-SRA weighting method fully representing the sustainable development of indicators was

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Pingtao Yi: Conceptualization, Visualization, Writing - original draft. Weiwei Li: Methodology, Writing - review & editing. Danning Zhang: Investigation, Formal analysis.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71671031, P.T. Yi; No. 71701040, W.W. Li), Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Chinese Ministry of Education (No. 17YJC630067, W.W. Li) and the Fundamental Research Funds of the Central Universities of China (No. 2006013, P.T. Yi; No. N2006007, W.W. Li). Authors thank for the helpful comments from editors and anonymous reviewers.

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