Sustainability Evaluation of Cities in Northeastern China Using Dynamic TOPSIS-Entropy Methods

The revitalization of Northeastern China has been an important topic in China in recent years. Sustainable development of cities plays a strong role in the revitalization process. In this paper, we evaluated the sustainability of the 34 prefecture-level and above cities in Northeastern China. The evaluation process was viewed as a dynamic evaluation problem. A dynamic technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) and entropy method was developed by extending the entropy weight and TOPSIS to dynamic situation. It was found that the sustainability levels of the cities in Northeastern China were comparatively low. Only four sub-provincial cities’ average performances were over 0.5 (accounting for 11.8%). Except for Jixi, nearly all the cities had dim sustainability because of the lower positive or even negative growth rates. In addition to Shenyang, Dalian, Changchun, Harbin, and Daqing, the other cities performed worst in the economic sustainability with performance values below 0.3. This implicates that the necessity and urgency of improving the economic sustainability levels of the cities in Northeastern China to realize the coordinated development of the three dimensions (economy, society and environment). In terms of the cities located in Liaoning province, they need to pay more attention to the economic sustainability, even though their economy basis (or levels) were comparatively better than that in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces. For the cities in Jilin and Heilongjiang provinces, the decline of their environmental sustainability was serious. This case should arouse the attention of local authorities.