A Comprehensive Evaluation of Urban Sustainable Development in China Based on the TOPSIS-Entropy Method

Lin Ding, Zhenfeng Shao, Hanchao Zhang, Cong Xu and Dewen Wu
Additional contact information
Lin Ding: School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China
Zhenfeng Shao: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China
Hanchao Zhang: School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China
Cong Xu: Xi’an University of Science and Technology, 58 Yanta Road, Xi’an 710054, China
Dewen Wu: State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 8, 1-23

Abstract: The Chinese government started an important project “Geographical conditions monitoring (GCM)” in 2012, which aims at fully revealing the spatial pattern of natural resources, and economic and social development. Urban development assessment and analysis are an important topic of the comprehensive statistics in GCM project. This study quantitatively evaluates the sustainable development level of 287 cities at prefecture level and above in China and analyzes their spatial distribution. Both an index system of urban sustainable development (USI) constructed by three aspects, namely society, economy and environment, and the TOPSIS-Entropy method are adopted. The results show that the overall level of urban sustainable development in China is not high, and obvious differences in urban sustainable development among cities exist. The coordination of social, economic and environmental sustainable development in China is at a low level. In terms of spatial distribution, cities from eastern coastal areas of China are at relatively higher levels of sustainable development with central and northeastern cities ranking second and western ones lowest. Several spatial clusters of urban sustainable development can be found. The “High–High” clusters, in which cities have high levels of sustainable development, are distributed in urban agglomerations. Finally, some suggestions have been provided to achieve all-round sustainable development in China.

Keywords: sustainable development; TOPSIS; entropy; spatial cluster; urban agglomeration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (47)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/8/746/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/8/746/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:8:y:2016:i:8:p:746-:d:75327

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().