An eco-city indicator system for the city of Changsha

With rapid urban development in China, many cities are still concerned about the quantity of the economy growth while ignoring the quality of the growth; ecological systems face a challenging situation. How to evaluate and guide a sustainable devel-opment is a vitally important question to the government of China. The study was partly performed in cooperation with the Institute of Building Research (IBR), who was entrusted by Changsha government of the Hunan Province. To evaluate the sus-tainability of urban development, a comprehensive indicator system was developed and applied, which was consistent to the policy of the so called "Two oriented socie-ty", which means Resource conservation and Environment friendly society. This pa-per shows a logic methodology to develop an indicator system – through the re-search, from literature review to modern concept; it shows clearly the factors that are important to build a sustainable city. The indicator system was derived and compared with other existing systems. The comparison showed that the indicator system we developed for the city is operational and integrated with a consistent hierarchy. Thereafter, the established indicator sys-tem was evaluated using an Analytical Hierarchy Process methodology. Indictors of ecological aspects were evaluated using the data collected, including the Changsha green field map, wetland map and ecological control maps. The indicator system was applied and the result was used as decision support in urban planning for 2020. How-ever, a main limitation lied in data collection: since the data we collected was not completely the data we expected. Besides, the indicator system was developed on the base of the policy called the "Two oriented society",which has its preference and limi-tation itself. Still, in sum, the indicator system we built through the research provided a satisfactory framework to the government to guide the development of the society in a macro scale. It needs future involvement to improve the data collection and standardization.