Urban Sustainable Development Based on the Framework of Sponge City: 71 Case Studies in China

Sponge city is a new urban stormwater management strategy proposed in China, which enables the city to absorb and save stormwater like a sponge, then release stormwater to solve the problems of urban waterlogging and water shortage. However, at present, sponge cities are confronted with such problems as high management cost and low management efficiency, a lack of research on collaborative management between cities and the feasibility of regional cooperation between sponge cities needs to be proved. Therefore, this article puts forward the theory of sponge city regional ecological cooperative management and builds a multivariate cluster analysis model of sponge city and conducts an empirical study on data of 71 Chinese cities. The research results show that under the multi-index linkage system, China’s urban climate and ecological characteristics do have the characteristics of regional agglomeration and the basic conditions of interregional ecological cooperation, which proves the feasibility of the hypothesis of regional cooperation. Therefore, strengthening the ecological cooperation of sponge cities among regional cities is conducive to improving the supply efficiency of ecological environment quality and realizing the sustainable development of cities.