Green City Assessment Index System And Case Study

Cities are highly concentrated areas of human civilization.With the development of urban economy and the expansion of population and scale,the contradiction between urban development and resources-environment becomes more and more prominent.Inefficient use of energy and land resources,shortage of water resources and environmental pollution all threaten the healthy development of cities.The green transformation of Chinese cities is the main direction of urban development in the future.To evaluate urban green development level is an important part of the green city construction.It is necessary to set up a scientific and feasible evaluation index system,not only for understanding the current green city development level and the development trend of the future,but also for finding a suitable pathway according to each city’s own characteristics by comparing the indicators among cities,Firstly,based on the connotation of green city,a set of scientific evaluation indicators is constructed from three dimensions of green production,green living and environmental quality,with three indicators attributes of positive,negative and specific direction.Secondly,according to the function and the urbanization stage of cities,China’s cities are zoned and classified,and the weight coefficients of different categories of cities are set respectively.Then,aiming at improvement of the existing index standardization method,a double-benchmark method is established.Finally,36 cities including provincial capital cities,municipalities directly under the central government and state plan cities are selected as case cities.The characteristics of green development of Chinese cities are explored in combination with geographical zone.The main findings are as follows:1.Combining with the actual situation and characteristics of Chinese cities,this paper selects 11 secondary indicators from three dimensions of green production,green living and environmental quality,and then constructs a green city evaluation index system consisting of 30 specific indicators from these 11 directions.The indicators are all quantitative indicators,which integrates the rule of big data using,high practicability and data accessibility.It is suitable for the green development evaluation of Chinese cities.2.Based on the function of city and the urbanization rate,a method of weight assignment combining subjectivity and objectivity is proposed.According to the main function zoning,Chinese cities can be divided into four zone categories: optimized development,key development,restricted development and prohibited development.Then according to the urbanization rate,the cities are divided into three types: high urbanization,medium urbanization and low urbanization.Through integrating the classification of city function and urbanization rate,12 groups of weight coefficients for different types of cities are obtained,and the differentiation evaluation mode for different types of cities is realized.3.Through the double-benchmark method,the upper and lower scores of each indicator are defined,which improves the stability of the index system.we evaluated 36 cities in China,the results show that the environmental quality score is the highest and the green production score is the lowest among the three subsystems.The average score of the sample cities is only 67.59,which belongs to the general level,and there are large differences between cities.Xiamen(75.79)and Nanchang(75.72)ranked the top two,but they have not reached the excellent level,while Lanzhou and Lhasa ranked the bottom two.Moreover,the development of most cities is unbalanced,with more than half of them ranking more than 10 out of the three subsystems.In terms of geographical location,cities in East China are generally superior to inland cities,and the green development index of Chinese cities is gradually rising from northwest to southeast.Among the green production subsystems,Central China(71.57)and East China(70.02)ranked the top two,Northwest China(40.26)came in last,but in the environmental quality subsystem,contrary to green production subsystem,Northwest China(76.12)ranked the top one,while Central China(66.54)ranked last.