Assessment on sustainable development of three major urban agglomerations in China based on sustainability-differentiation-combined weighting method

Sustainability is an important topic in the development process of urban agglomerations. Sustainability assessment is an effective way to monitor the sustainable development of urban agglomerations. Based on the three-pillars model, the paper assessed the sustainability of the three major urban agglomerations in China by selecting 18 indicators from economic, social, and environmental dimensions. A new sustainability-differentiation-combined weighting method was proposed, which considers the sustainability at indicator level as well as highlights the difference at urban agglomeration level. The assessment results show that the Pearl River Delta (PRD) urban agglomeration performed best, followed by the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) urban agglomeration and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) urban agglomeration. However, the sustainability level of the three urban agglomerations was not high. It primarily caused by the downward development trend of economic sustainability of the three urban agglomerations. And the YRD and PRD urban agglomerations had lower performances on social sustainability. The spatial sustainability of the urban agglomerations was also analyzed, and the results show the spatial linkage development within the urban agglomerations was poor. Based on these findings, some valuable suggestions were provided as reference for the sustainability construction of the urban agglomerations.