Smart city, smart growth

The world is rapidly urbanizing, it is more and more important to coordinate the balance between rapid urbanization and sustainable development. To make contribution to explore this project, we determine a metric model, named Three E Metric Model, to assess the degree of the urban smart growth. First, considering the principles of smart growth, 17 influence factors are selected and divided into three subsystems include Economy(affected by GDP per capita, the proportion of tertiary industrial output-value, etc.), Environment (affected by water use efficiency, wastewater treatment rate, land use, etc.) and Social Equity (unemployment rate, Gini coefficient, etc.). The actual value of each factor is divided by standard value (refer to international standards) and then multiply corresponding weight calculated by Analytic Hierarchy Process. In this way, we construct Smart Growth Index (SGI) and divide the cities into five grades. The higher SGI is, the better smart growth is.