Integrated Model for Evaluating Infrastructure Sustainability in China

Being critical to modern economy and society, infrastructure must be sustainable to maintain long-term use value and to satisfy the future need for urban development and economic growth. Although existing knowledge and practice of evaluating sustainable infrastructure is focused primarily on an individual project or facility, research is needed to integrate sustainability into infrastructure evaluation at the system level (e.g., a city or region). The system level of sustainability evaluation is especially important to support public policy decision making on infrastructure investment. This paper presents an integrated framework of sustainability assessment for urban infrastructure systems. The framework adopts a hierarchy structure of indicators to measure sustainable infrastructure system. It also integrates factor analysis, TOPSIS model, entropy weight model, and combined evaluation method into the analysis and decision-making process. A region of Yangtze River Delta (YRD) in China is discussed as a case study to demonstrate the merit of the integrated framework. The evaluation results indicate that the sustainability of infrastructure system is different among the cities of YRD and is closely related to the economic development level and geographical position. Some cities, such as Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou with high economic development levels, have advanced infrastructure systems, whereas the infrastructure sustainability in some cities away from regional economic centers and lack of competitive industries are relatively low. This study provides an alternative methodology to assess the sustainability of urban infrastructure systems.