Sustainability assessment of port cities with a hybrid model-empirical evidence from China

Port city is an important part of marine economic activities, whose development contributes to the connection of economic and environment between home and abroad. Sustainability of port cities not only can enhance the competitiveness of port cities, but also affects the city development process and characteristics. Therefore, it is pivotal to evaluate sustainability of port cities in advance. However, existing research on sustainable port cities is quite limited. And most of them are limited to the qualitative perspective, with little quantitative analysis. Therefore, this paper adopts a novel hybrid model THPD to evaluate sustainable port cities, expanding sustainability theories by taking port cities as research object. 21 port cities in China are selected for quantitative study. The results display that the sustainable level of port cities in China is at a medium level. The weaknesses and critical factors are varied, which points out the improvement direction for sustainable port cities.