A study of sustainable development of chinese central cities based on the grey fixed-weight clustering method

The sustainable development of the central cities has great effect on the development of Chinese urbanization. In this paper, we present a synthetic index system to appraise the urban sustainable development level with respect to economy, society, and environment. Combining the grey fixed-weight clustering method with the levelled eigenvalue method, we evaluate the sustainable development level of 18 central cities in China. The experimental results indicate that problems existing in them vary from one to another. On average, cities of higher level are facing greater pressure of improving their environmental quality; middle-level cities are worrying about the fact that their social development falls far behind the economic growth; the task of priority for under-developed cities is to develop their economy. Such conclusions reached from the study are in some sense instructive for Chinese cities´ development.