Against the background of sustainable development, green building practices could be part of the strategy for solving environmental and energy problems in developing countries. The aim of this paper is to explore a system for the assessment of green buildings in China that provides the government and stakeholders with ways to improve their strategies for green building development. We apply a hybrid model, developed by integrating the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory and Analytical Network Process (called DANP) method, to build an influential network relationship map (INRM) between assessment systems and to derive the criterion weights. The INRM and derived weights can help us to understand this complex assessment system and to set improvement priorities for green building development. The results demonstrate that indoor environment, materials, and smart facilities are the top three critical factors for green building evaluation. Finally, we discuss some management implications based on an actual case study with solutions provided using this model.

In China, with the acceleration of urbanization, people pay more attention to the quality of urban environment. Air pollution, vegetation destruction, water waste and pollution, and waste sorting have restricted the sustainable development of urban environment. It is important to evaluate the impact of these environmental concerns as a prerequisite to implement an effective urban environmental sustainability policy. The aim of this paper is to establish a system for evaluating sustainable urban environmental quality in China. We extracted six dimensions and 29 criteria for assessing urban sustainable environment. Then, a fuzzy technique and the best worst method were applied to obtain the weights for the dimensions and criteria. Next, grey possibility values were applied to evaluate the sustainable environmental quality of five cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou in China. A sensitivity analysis was performed to identify how the ranking of these five cities changed when varying the weights of each criterion. The results show that pollution control, the natural environment, and water management are the three most important dimensions for urban environmental quality evaluation. We suggest that controlling pollutant emissions, strengthening food waste management, improving clean production processes, and utilizing heat energy are the effective measures to improve the urban environment and achieve sustainable urban environmental development.

With the intensification of urbanization, the application of contemporary technology to make cities smarter is the key to their sustainable development (SD). This study aims to propose a comprehensive assessment framework for the SD of smart cities. First, an assessment system with 5 dimensions and 25 indicators is proposed in this paper. Second, a Z fuzzy-based multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) model is developed to clarify the internal influence of the indicators and to determine the SD performance of smart cities. The Z-DEMATEL (decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory) technique was used to determine the mutual influence relationship of the indicator and their influence weights. Moreover, this paper selected one well-known city in China as a case study and used the Z-TOPSIS-AL (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution based on aspiration level) approach for analysis. The results demonstrate that quality of life, per capita GDP, and GDP growth rate are the top three indicators, which means that decision-makers should pay more attention to these indicators when constructing and managing a smart city. This study provides a reference for follow-up related research, and the management findings provide a basis for managers to make decisions on the development of smart cities.