Sustainable Development Path of Resource-Based Cities—Taking Datong as an Example

Abstract

Sustainable development has become a global consensus, and cities are important spatial carriers to achieve sustainable development. There are more than 200 resource-based cities in China. These cities have a single industrial and energy structure. With the gradual depletion of urban resources, they are generally facing problems such as difficult industrial transformation, lagging development of alternative industries, and serious damage to the ecological environment. They are facing multiple challenges to achieve sustainable development. Our paper creatively uses the multiple interactive feedback relationships among the systems of “driving force–pressure–state–influence–response” in resource-based cities to establish a comprehensive evaluation model for the sustainable development of resource-based cities through the comprehensive evaluation index system of sustainable development. It is concluded that the higher the coordination degree of each subsystem in the model is, the stronger the sustainable development ability of the city is, which provides new ideas and suggestions for the sustainable development of resource-based cities. The case study shows that the coordinated dispatching C value tends to 2.216, indicating that the sustainable development evaluation values of each subsystem in the model tend to be close, and the coordination between subsystems is high. This confirms the rationality of establishing a comprehensive evaluation model for the sustainable development of resource-based cities.