Abstract:

Yangtze River Delta is the most developed urbanized area with the highest population density,the most developed economy and the strongest competitiveness in China,however,it is faced with so many problems such as industrial structure convergence,population aging,weak resources and environment et al.In this paper,the assessment indicator system of sustainable development including three sunsystems and 22 indicators was built for Yangtze River Delta,and the sustainability index and the system harmony index were used to analyze the level of sustainable development and the system correspondence in this area.The 16 cities were divided into four development patterns based on three factors,the per capita GDP,the urbanization level and the threeindustry  in the total GDP,and different development patterns had different development features and trajectories from 2000 to 2010.The evolution tree model was adopted to analyze the path of sustainable development of cities which belonged to different development patterns from 2000 to 2010 in this paper.The evaluation and evolution results are as follows.The sustainable level of cities in Yangtze River Delta were close to each other,but the system harmony indexes had large gap.The scores of subsystems had some spatial regulation.The distribution of the economic score and the social score were similar with each other,but the score of resources and environment was totally different from them.There were four development patterns with different characteristics and development path from 2000 to 2010,based on the per capita GDP,the urbanization level and the threeindustry  in the total GDP.The cities belonging to different development patterns had different evolution path of sustainable development.Cities of the pattern Ⅰ such as Shanghai,Nanjing and Hangzhou,which were the core cities of region,had an unstable sustainable development trend.Those system harmony index were not high enough except the continually increasing sustainable level of Hangzhou.Cities of the pattern Ⅱ such as Suzhou,Wuxi and Changzhou,had a good development situation,because the sustainability index and the system harmony index were both in a high level and the total sustainability level was improving.In 2010,the level of pattern Ⅱ with ranked the highest place,except Changzhou whose economic strength was behind of the other cities in this pattern.The change of the cities belonging to the pattern Ⅱ from 2000 to 2010 was so violent that cities in other areas with the similar features should focus much attention on the sustainable development.Cities of pattern Ⅲ and pattern Ⅳ,which located in the center of Jiangsu province and the center of Zhejiang province,had a low level of sustainability because of the laggard economy.The cities in this area had no advantages to accept the economic radiation from the core cities,and the resources in these cities had gap from the developed cities.So the most important thing for the cities of pattern Ⅲ and pattern Ⅳ is to choose the right way to improve the economy with the environment protected.