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Urban sustainability indicators re-visited: lessons from property-led urban development in China

Abstract This paper proposes a bespoke urban sustainability indicator framework in the context of China’s prevalent property-led urban development. Emphasising local characteristics and incorporating underlying institutions, it advocates a more nuanced, holistic and dynamic approach when addressing sustainability issues. Selection of indicators were based on extensive literature reviews and tested through an international expert survey comprising both China-based and overseas-based experts. The two groups of experts have shown divergent views, with the former prioritising economic and institutional aspects over environmental and social factors. It also provides transferable policy insights into developing countries more generally, given many similarities in broader development challenges. Discussion on recent literature and urban development reinforces the applicability of these tailor-made indicators to not only monitoring but also explaining and predicting urban changes. We argue it is necessary to recognise the centrality of property-led urban development in urban sustainable development, and the need for examining the complex relations between the property sector and urban sustainability via inclusion of institutional analysis and a multi-method approach combining quantitative and qualitative evaluations.