Week 4 Reading reflection (1)

Urban areas are facing greater challenges, because of population growth and city expansion. The authors identified some dimensions and chose several indicators in these three articles. The common points are environmental, economic, social and governance aspects.

•        Environmental dimension

The rapid urbanization is often at the expense of the loss of valuable ecosystems and lands for satisfying the urban demands. Authors used 10 indicators to measure the performance of 9 sample cities with respect to environmental dimension (Shen et al., 2011). Similarly, environmental stressed include depletion of natural resources, pollution, excessive land use with consequent loss of biodiversity (Bentivegna et al., 2015). At the same time, China is facing enormous challenges to keep balance sustainable use of resources and environmental protection (Liu et al., 2014).

•         Social dimension

Urban population has been increasing and it is estimated to reach 70% of total world population by 2025. Social sustainability was considered as one of the indispensable dimensions for measuring urban sustainability (Shen et al., 2011). In order to promote social sustainability, equitable distribution of opportunities and resources was one of the vital aspects. The authors mentioned that social stress is often associated with poor sense of community (Bentivegna et al., 2015). While in paper they suggested that people’s lifestyle has to be taken into account (Liu et al., 2014).