Development of integrated urban sustainability assessment framework for high-density cities and quantification by applying TOPSIS method

Abstract

With the high speed of urbanization and economic growth, the urban areas are suffering from tremendous pressures. To avoid and minimise serious social, environmental, and economic disruptions to societies, government officers at all levels  policy makers, planners, designers, engineers, investors and all decision-makers in both private and public sectors  should promote urban sustainable development. This research has integrated urban Municipal Infrastructure and Facilities indicators, Ecological System Indicators and Human System Indicators into one holistic assessment framework as well as established a TOPSIS model for quantification, which enables evaluating the performances of 15 Chinese high density cities in terms of sustainable development degree. This method considers the scientific validity, measurability and data availability. The computing of the evaluation results, i.e. cities ranking, is implemented with Python. The High Density Urban Sustainability Index (HDUSI) makes up for a lack of consideration of municipal infrastructure and facilities in urban sustainable development; it also considers the pressures that human development exerts on urban environments. The aims of the research are to develop a holistic and integrated modelling approach framework that contains a list of indicators and sub-indicators, to identify the appropriate sustainability assessment metrics for high density cities. The objectives of this study include to critically review various existing sustainability assessment frameworks; to examine what are the most important indicators for high density urban sustainability assessment; to develop an indicator based framework to assess municipal infrastructure and facilities; to apply a quantification method to test the framework and to identify a multi-criteria decision making tool with improvement measures for strategic planning towards urban sustainable development.