The World Cities Day Global Observance has recently returned to its origin, Shanghai, where the Shanghai Index was released together with the new Shanghai Manual. The Shanghai Index is the world’s first sustainable urban development index based on a framework of economic, social, cultural, environmental and governance concepts. The Shanghai Index is currently being piloted in more than 20 global cities participating in the flagship program of UN SDG Cities and is also being piloted in an innovative manner in nearly 100 cities in China’s five major city clusters and five new towns in Shanghai.

Zhu Dajian, a professor from the Department of Public Administration of Tongji SEM and Director of the Institute of Sustainable Development and Governance of Tongji University, and Chen Haiyun, a teacher from the Department of Public Administration of Tongji SEM and Chief Expert of the Shanghai Index research team, have recently been interviewed by the Nightly Interview column of the STV News and General channel. During the interview, they decoded the Shanghai Index, analyzed the connotation of the Shanghai Index, and presented their views on the relationship, dimension, form, development and application of the Shanghai Index.

Q1: What is the definition of the Shanghai Index?

Zhu Dajian: Briefly, the Shanghai Index can be summarized into two points: Firstly, it was jointly developed by a Chinese research team and international experts from the United Nations (“UN”). Secondly, it is an international authoritative index for assessing sustainable urban development. “Jointly developed” means that the selection of indicators in the research framework was completed by the Chinese team and international technological experts from the UN after repeated discussions.

Q2: What are the specific dimensions of the Shanghai Index? How should it be evaluated?

Chen Haiyun: The Shanghai Index will be overall evaluated in several different dimensions, such as economy, society, and environment. It involves a holistic evaluation approach.

Q3: What are the relationships between the entirety and each dimension?

Chen Haiyun: When it comes to describing the overall level of a city, some will focus on its economic development level, some on its social level, and some on its eco-environment level. Different dimensions have different focuses. When we get an answer, we will also be inclined to different dimensions of the answer. The Shanghai Index aims to identify and solve problems.

Zhu Dajian: It is the relationship between a whole and its parts. The comprehensive index describes the whole situation and is divided into several main areas to support the whole. The Shanghai Index reflects the overall city situation and is also broken down into various areas for different situations.

Q4: Each city has its distinct characteristics. Is this index used for different cities in the same pattern? Or will there be some variations?

Chen Haiyun: A distinctive characteristic of the Shanghai Index is that in the construction of the whole comprehensive index system, it has two index systems: one is the core index system, and the other one is the adaptive index system. The core index system contains some common and strongly correlated aspects of global cities to stabilize the overall core architecture of the Shanghai Index. On the other hand, adaptive indicators are needed to interpret different cities because they have different characteristics and directivity indicators. So, such a combination of core indicators and adaptive indicators can reflect the sustainable development levels of cities perfectly.

Q5: Among so many international indexes, what are the characteristics and advantages of the Shanghai Index?

Zhu Dajian: The Shanghai Index is different from other international indexes in two aspects: Firstly, many international indexes are single and specific, while the Shanghai Index is comprehensive and integrated. For example, the shipping center and financial center of Shanghai are regarded as a single indicator respectively, while the sustainable development index is comprehensive. Secondly, many indexes belong to non-government or academic departments and are research indexes, while the Shanghai Index is an official index resulting from the collaboration between the UN-Habitat and the Shanghai Municipal Government.

Q6: What is the future direction of the Shanghai Index? What role can it play in urban development in the future?

Zhu Dajian: It’s now very necessary to implement the UN SDGs at the city level, to which the Shanghai Index aims to provide intellectual and spiritual support in the future. As the data is selected in Shanghai, we hope it can also provide some support to Shanghai. Shanghai has achieved satisfactory results in building its five centers. However, those results are economic. So we wondered whether its economic development matches the all-around development. Through rolling experiments, we observed and verified the data on Shanghai for two years and discovered that Shanghai also came out top in the sustainable development index, which means that Shanghai has a huge economic volume and dynamic economic competition. Also, it means that Shanghai’s comprehensive quality and its economy support each other. So, based on this case of Shanghai, we need to look at every city in the world from two aspects: one, whether it has economic competitiveness; two, whether it satisfies people’s spiritual needs. Only by meeting the two aspects can a city achieve sustainable development.