Abstract
The Capital Economic Circle is an important planning project in China. Sustainability is a key factor for the long-term development of the Capital Economic Circle. In this paper, we investigated the sustainability of 13 cities in the Capital Economic Circle using three dimensions: economy, society, and environment. The induced ordered weighted averaging (IOWA) operator was used for the aggregation of criteria data. The order-inducing variable in the IOWA operator was measure by the correlation degree of a criterion and all the other criteria. Criteria with larger order-inducing values were given more weight as they provided more support for the development of other criteria. The assessment results indicate that the sustainable development of most of the cities, except for Beijing and Tianjin, is poor, with performance values below 0.5. By comparing the development using three dimensions, it was found that poor performances of economic sustainability were the main reason for this. Additionally, all of the cities showed a sound momentum of sustainable growth even though the sustainable levels of most of the cities were not high. In terms of sustainable development across the three dimensions, the cities had the highest levels of environmental sustainability. The social sustainability of the cities, except for Beijing and Tianjin, was better than their economic sustainability. However, more than half of the cities (accounting for 53.8%) showed a decline in social sustainability, especially for Zhangjiakou, which had the highest degree of decline of 4.00%. Some suggestions have been provided on the basis of the main assessment results. For example, Beijing should invest more in education as well as further easing transportation pressure. There is room for further improvement of the social and environmental sustainability of Tianjin. The other cities should focus on developing economic sustainability as well as preventing the decline of social sustainability.
Highlights
The urbanization rate in China in 2017 was 58.5%, showing a great increase in the rate from that in 1953, which was 15.29% [1]
We investigated the sustainable development of the cities in the Capital Economic Circle
The induced ordered weighted averaging (IOWA) operator was used to aggregate the criteria data collected for the dimensions of economy, society, and environment
Summary
The urbanization rate in China in 2017 was 58.5%, showing a great increase in the rate from that in 1953, which was 15.29% [1]. City sustainable development is an important issue, as it is normally accompanied by various social-environmental problems: congestion, poor sanitation conditions, noise, and overcrowding, as well as fire and health risks [2,3]. The assessment of city sustainability performance has become popular for researchers in a wide range of fields [4,5,6,7]. A widely accepted approach includes developing a framework involving a set of criteria selected from a combination of three dimensions—namely, the environmental (ecological), economic, and social dimensions [9]—which is known as the three-pillar model [10,11,12]. Many researchers have defined sustainability using other dimensions. Culture [13,14] and governance [15,16] are the additional dimensions believed to affect sustainability in some manner [17]
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