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Sustainable urban development has been a popular subject in urban studies and related disciplines. Owing to the challenges faced by cities worldwide to accommodate the growing urban populations, it is becoming ever more important for innovative research on sustainable urban development to be performed to help cities achieve sustainability. This study develops and tests an integrated approach to sustainable city assessment, which is a combination of importance-performance analysis (IPA) and modified analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Questionnaires designed following the IPA concept were distributed to residents of three cities. The importance scores from the collected data were factorized and the factors' relative scores were then calculated using a formula developed in this study to represent pairwise comparisons. The derived criteria weights were applied to the performance scores to evaluate the cities' relative overall sustainability performance. This approach replaces the AHP's 1-9 scale with the IPA's importance rating scale, which is a Likert scale, in the questionnaire. Based on the findings, implications and future research suggestions were provided., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)