Constructing a standard system of city sustainable development assessment technology based on the SDGs

Given the rapid development of China’s new urbanization, cities with different locations and varying functional positioning, resource endowments, and development stages have insufficient scientific and applicable technical tools for implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). City managers and policymakers must urgently establish SDG benchmarks to diagnose city development. Moreover, successful experiences from similar cities regarding sustainable development and self-improvement must be learned from to promote diversified, sustainable development across the country. Furthermore, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data and 5G are widely used in smart cities. Therefore, there is a growing need for “knowledge-based, personalized and intelligent” technologies to support monitoring, evaluation, and decision-making processes facilitating sustainable development in cities. This paper uses standardization as the theoretical support and technical basis. This approach can help clarify the sustainable development processes in China and clarify the evaluation results of and provide data on horizontal city comparisons, which can be used to develop evaluation technology for sustainable development in cities and construct a standardized system. The results provide a standard framework for intelligent assessment and decision-making regarding cities’ sustainable development capabilities in China. Evaluating major international standardization institutions reveals that the practices of Chinese national standards should be fully absorbed and integrated to guide the evaluation of smart, resilient, and low-carbon cities. To this end, an indicator library of city sustainable development is proposed to provide standard evaluation technology methods. Finally, analyzing the response relationship of the indicator library to SDGs reveals the need for a standardized knowledge map of sustainable development assessment techniques and methods from the perspective of integrated management for sustainable development in cities.