| Abstract |
Cities serve as pivotal symbols of human civilization, and evaluating their development and decline is crucial for urban planning, construction, and governance. Such evaluations carry substantial implications for local government performance assessments, corporate investments, and residents' settlements. However, current research on city evaluation faces several challenges, including ambiguous evaluation purposes and target audiences, a lack of a solid theoretical or practical foundation for index systems, high redundancy in indices, poor comparability, disregard for urban diversity, an excessive focus on city rankings, and a dearth of result validation and feedback mechanisms. There is also a shortage of systematic interpretation regarding the composition, principles, paradigms, process, and uncertainties associated with urban evaluation systems. In this paper, we commence by scrutinizing the structural interconnections and evolution of urban systems through the lens of complex systems and living organisms. Subsequently, we elucidate the fundamental concepts, components, and functions of city evaluation, categorize the key paradigms, and propose four basic principles: people- centric, emergence, balance, and feedback- driven. We posit that the city evaluation system comprises five essential elements: the evaluating subject, the evaluated object, the index framework, evaluation methods, and the evaluation findings. We provide a comprehensive exploration of the general quantitative city evaluation process, encompassing ten distinct phases. These phases include clarifying the subject/object and the evaluation goals, establishing the theoretical underpinning and logical framework, outlining the criteria for indicator selection, establishing the evaluation index system, ensuring the consistency and dimensionless of the indicators, determining the weightings and thresholds of the indicators, selecting or constructing the evaluation model, analyzing and validating the evaluation outcomes, displaying and applying the results, and overseeing and incorporating feedback into the evaluation. The uncertainty and limitations of city evaluation are sorted from the aspects of cognition, data, indicators, methods, and systems. Furthermore, we envision the future of city evaluation for sustainable development, emphasizing the need to assemble a diverse group of evaluation stakeholders, develop a unified and shared foundational information platform, create a city space- time knowledge map, harness emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, and digital twinning, promote "dynamic perception, multi- evaluation collaboration" and forge a future city that embodies inclusivity, safety, fairness, environmental sustainability, and resilience. © 2024 Science Press. All rights reserved. |
