LAUSR

Abstract With the rapid urbanization process, city sustainability is a hot topic for scholars. Effective evaluation of city sustainability is an important aspect of city sustainability. This paper evaluated the sustainability of the 17 cities in Shandong province, China. A set of 21 indicators were selected from economic, social and environmental dimensions. The indicator weights were calculated using the deviation maximization (DM) method to highlight the overall difference among the performance values of alternatives. It is found that the sustainability levels of the cities in Shandong province were not ideal. Only two cities’ average performance values (accounting for 11.76%) were over 3.5 in the year 2012–2016. In addition, cities located in East Shandong had the best performance and in West Shandong showed the worst performance. The average performances of all the cities, except for Dongying, Qingdao and Weihai, were below 1 on economic sustainability. The performances of social sustainability were very uncoordinated, with the highest value being 2.18 and the lowest −1.94. In addition to Dongying and Weihai, all the cities were at same level on environmental sustainability, but 7 cities (accounting for 41.8%) showed negative growth. This case should arouse the attention of local authorities.