LB 32-315 - Unveiling the urban unbalanced performance and its relationship with sustainable development with scale-adjusted metrics

Background/Question/Methods:

Understanding the coevolution of urban functions is critical to building a sustainable city balancing economic, environmental, and social development. The scale-adjusted method provides direct and comparable measures of city performance from the perspective of urban scaling law to investigate the interrelations of urban functions and the impact of their imbalance on the sustainable development. With this new quantitative framework, we measured the scale-adjusted city development across several key dimensions of urban functioning for Chinese cities in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2019. We then explored the relationship between the city development and functional imbalance to seek for more targeted local policy implications.

Results/Conclusions:

We found that the development of Chinese cities was unbalanced, with the better economy, urban construction, and healthcare performance, the worse education conditions. The functional imbalance showed opposite dependency with city development in over- and under-performed cities, suggesting different developmental strategies for cities in different developmental states. The scale-adjusted (dis)advantages and corresponding imbalance of cities’ performance showed temporal correlations for decades, highlighting the long-term effect of local events and dynamics on urban evolution.