麦肯锡中国城市可持续发展报告(7)

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The Urban China Initiative

Executive summary

The Urban Sustainable Index (USI) 2013 builds upon the work carried out in USI 2011. USI 2013 has expanded and upgraded the indicators used in USI 2011. The analysis deploys 23 metrics, which cover four categories: economy, society, resources and environment. We ranked 185 cities, of varying sizes and at different stages of development, by their level of sustainability from 2005 to 2011. To ensure data was available, as well as to reflect the full landscape of Chinese cities, our sample includes all levels of cities from municipalities directly under the central government, to county-level cities with populations ranging from 200,000 to 20 million.

Our study also benchmarks sample Chinese cities against advanced global cities. We studied the basic principles affecting the development of urban sustainability in order to identify closely-related features. Our aim is to understand how China’s sustainability drive is evolving, and to provide an international reference for Chinese cities during this process. The indicator system serves as a quantifiable scoring tool to evaluate cities urban

development. With this tool, Chinese cities can identify models for urban development both within China and abroad, based on their own stage of development. Depending on how they scored in each category and their overall score, Chinese cities can also identify their advantages and disadvantages, craft development strategies, and evaluate the potential impact and effectiveness of development policies.

Key findings of the research include the following:

1. Most of China’s cities have improved their level of sustainability in recent years, primarily in the social and environment sub-categories. This reflects both strong underlying progress driven by healthy economic growth and a renewed emphasis on delivering social and environmental benefits.

2. The top 10 cities with best overall sustainability performance are located mostly in the coastal or eastern regions. Cities in the east showed the strongest level of overall sustainability, followed by cities in central and western China. The same is true of city performance in the economic, social and environmental sub-categories studied. From 2008 to 2011, the gap between western and central cities was somewhat widened, with central cities gradually catching up with eastern cities. Situated in geographic locations favorable to trade and investment opportunities, Eastern cities were early beneficiaries of China’s economic liberalization policies. However, since each city is at a different stage of economic development, the strongest economic performers are not necessarily those cities with the fastest improvement in sustainability.

3. In the long term, the sustainability of China’s cities is positively correlated to economic strength, population size, and density, FDI, and migration. However, our sample cities show there are clear turning points at which a city’s sustainability potentially slows down, or stalls. This becomes especially evident when a city with a population size of more than 4.5 million, population density of more than 8000 people per square kilometer, FDI of more than USD 3 billion, or with a more than 30% share of migrants. Most developed Chinese cities are positioned at such sustainability turning points: Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou,

Hangzhou, Tianjin, Chengdu, Nanjing, Shenyang, Wuhan and Chongqing.