Abstract:

Smart Growth is an inevitable choice for China city sustainable growth with constraints of resources and environment, it’s very important to integration of this theory with the practice of China cities’ growth. This article firstly designed an evaluation index system according to the principles of Smart Growth.The system includes four growth dimensions which are the growth of city scale,city spatial, city consumption and city welfare.Based on the improved entropy method, we evaluated the Smart Growth degree of 16 cities in the Yangtze River Delta by using urban statistical data from 1999 to 2008.Findings indicate that the entropy of all 16 cities shows an increasing trend,and the growth becomes more and more smart.The growth of Shanghai,Nanjing and Hangzhou is smarter than other 13 cities.The tendency of polarization of spatial disparities is gradually showed up.The dimensions of city welfare and city scale are the key features of city growth.Measures should be taken to control city consumption and expand potential city space.The indexes reflecting city environment,economic structure,employment structure,urbanization and the consumption of land and life energy make significant contribution to the evaluation