Measuring city sustainability and coupling coordinated performance in economy, society, environment, and governance in 52 northern Chinese cities

The coordinated development among city subsystems is an essential driving force of city sustainability. This paper uses the Entropy Weight-TOPSIS Model and Coupling Coordinated Model to measure and compare the City Sustainability Performance (CSP) and Coupling Coordination Performance (CCP) of 52 cities in northern China. The results show that the current measurement results of city sustainability may be too optimistic. The overall sustainability level of the northern Chinese cities is low. Only a few cities, such as the capital, provincial capitals, and other regional central cities, achieved relatively positive CSP and CCP. Nevertheless, under the surface, even in the cities with positive results, their subsystems’ coordinated development is unsatisfactory. The spatial distribution indicates that the high pollution and energy consumption industrial transfer from other regional central cities to the surrounding cities may cause the disadvantage of the CSP and CCP of the surrounding cities. In the context of slowing global and Chinese economic growth, the city economy subsystem development is likely to be lower than the development of the environment, society, and city governance subsystem. To achieve high-quality city development, cities should focus on achieving coordinated development of the environment, society, economy, and city governance.