Advances in the innovatively quantitative research approach for urban sustainable development

Abstract

Cities embody the intensive development mode, with only 3% of the land area to carry more than half of the world's population, so cities are the main front of sustainable development of human society. Urban sustainable development is an important practice of regional sustainable development. Starting from the basic connotation of sustainable development, this study focuses on urban sustainable development research, sorts out the evolution process of related theories and concepts, and reviews the research methods, especially new quantitative methods including evaluation index system method, complex system modeling, resource and environment sustainability exploration, etc. It is found that the index system method is often used in previous urban sustainable development assessments, but most assessments stay only on appearance and isolate the systemically internally organizational association, and the exploration of the system mechanism is not enough. The resources and environment play a fundamental role in supporting the development of human society, so some relatively innovative methods have been developed to study sustainable development from the perspective of resource and environmental sustainability. Human pressure and influence on nature were studied more, and the feedback of nature to human beings and the positive transformation of human beings to nature were not explored enough, also it is difficult to directly express the sustainability of the whole system. In recent years, resilience thinking and complex system science have been used many times to explain the grey box model of urban operation, but the research is slightly superficial. This study proposes research prospects which can combine resilience thinking and complex system science to analyze the sustainable urban development with new approaches in data science and computing science, and explore the scientific expression and deep mechanism of sustainability. Our study could provide scientific guidance for solving the complicated urban problems, and provide a theoretical basis for urban sustainable development.