Assessment of city sustainability—Coupling coordinated development among economy, society and environment

The coordination development among various subsystems, especially among economic, social and environmental subsystems, is an important part of urban sustainability that directly affects the quality of urbanization. This paper evaluated the sustainability of the 9 China’s national central cities using the coupling coordination model. In the evaluation process, an objective coupling weighting method was developed by the combination of the coupling analysis and the sequential relationship analysis method. The validity of this method was illustrated by comparing the coordination level of the cities with that obtained by the entropy method. Long-term use of this method can guide the coordination development among economy, society and environment of cities. The assessment results indicate that the coordination development among economy, society and environment of the cities was not ideal. Only one city, Beijing, located in the good coordination grade. The main reason is the lower development of economic sustainability. Policy recommendations were provided to address the problem. In addition, the paper concludes that there is a great room for improvement in the coordinated development of the cities, because they showed an increase trend in coordinated development and the economic growth rate was relatively high.