Constructing a standard system of city sustainable development assessment technology based on the SDGs

Given the rapid development of China’s new urbanization,cities with different locations and varying functional positioning,resource endowments,and development stages have insufficient scientific and applicable technical tools for implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).City managers and policymakers must urgently establish SDG benchmarks to diagnose city development.Moreover,successful experiences from similar cities regarding sustainable development and self-improvement must be learned from to promote diversified,sustainable development across the country.Furthermore,emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence,the Internet of Things,big data and 5G are widely used in smart cities.Therefore,there is a growing need for“knowledge-based,personalized and intelligent”technologies to support monitoring,evaluation,and decision-making processes facilitating sustainable development in cities.This paper uses standardization as the theoretical support and technical basis.This approach can help clarify the sustainable development processes in China and clarify the evaluation results of and provide data on horizontal city comparisons,which can be used to develop evaluation technology for sustainable development in cities and construct a standardized system.The results provide a standard framework for intelligent assessment and decision-making regarding cities’sustainable development capabilities in China.Evaluating major international standardization institutions reveals that the practices of Chinese national standards should be fully absorbed and integrated to guide the evaluation of smart,resilient,and low-carbon cities.To this end,an indicator library of city sustainable development is proposed to provide standard evaluation technology methods.Finally,analyzing the response relationship of the indicator library to SDGs reveals the need for a standardized knowledge map of sustainable development assessment techniques and methods from the perspective of integrated management for sustainable development in cities.

Coalition Emergency Response System, City Security and City Sustainable Development

The relations among the establishment of Coalition Emergency Response System （CERS）, city security and city sustainable development are analyzed in the article. According to the relation analysis, it is concluded that cities should build up their CERS to deal with the thread of damage in China. The recommendations about the establishment of the system are also provided.

The sustainable development of innovative cities in China： Comprehensive assessment and future configuration

Innovative cities not only constitute an important basis for innovation activities, but also play a strategically critical role in constructing an innovative country, producing new forms of urban development, and fostering urban sustainable development. Currently, China is marching toward the goal of establishing an innovative country by 2020, but in the start-up phase of this process of innovative city construction, the fundamental transition from factor-driven development to innovation-driven development is not being realized. As a result,a wide gap currently exists between China＇s innovative cities and the advanced innovative cities in developed countries. This paper argues that this necessary transition is being constrained by a series of bottlenecks in investment, income, techniques, contributions, and talents. The article takes 287 prefecture-level cities as its object of comprehensive assessment, developing a comprehensive assessment system for innovative cities and devising innovative monitoring system software in order to evaluate the current situation in China＇s innovative city construction. The analysis addresses four key aspects – namely,independent innovation, industrial innovation, living environmental innovation, and institutional innovation – as well as the spatial heterogeneity of the innovative city construction process. The results demonstrate that the level of innovation in Chinese cities is low, and the paper warns that building an innovation-oriented country will, as a consequence,be difficult. Some 87.8% of the cities studied maintained comprehensive levels of innovation that were lower than the national average. The level of comprehensive innovation in a city was found to have close and positive correlation with economic development. The level of the eastern region of China was, in particular, found to be significantly higher than that of the central and western regions. The levels of urban independent innovation, industrial innovation,environmental innovation, and institutional innovation showed consistent spatial heterogeneity, as did the comprehensive level of innovation in cities. In the future, the authors suggest, China should speed up the construction process in accordance with the basic principles of ＂independent innovation, breakthroughs in key fields, market-oriented, regional interaction, talent-supported,＂ with the purpose of building up Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai,and Guangzhou as global innovation centers; and Nanjing, Suzhou, Xiamen, Hangzhou, Wuxi,Xi＇an, Wuhan, Shenyang, Dalian, Tianjin, Changsha, Qingdao, Chengdu, Changchun, Hefei,and Chongqing as national innovation centers, by 2020. Through this process, China will finally build a national urban innovation network that includes 4 global innovative cities, 16 national innovative cities, 30 regional innovative cities, 55 local innovative cities, and 182innovation-driven development cities, thereby contributing to the establishment of an innovative country by 2020.