On Urban Amenity: Case Study of Cities Along the Yangtze River in Jiangsu

Urban amenity is driven from two sides of forces. The one is the serious problems existing in cities, and the another is the increasing demands of habitants. To sum up, there are mainly two perspectives to analyze urban amenities: the one is from the micro urban places and the another is about the complex macro-urban systems. This paper is carried out from the latter one. Firstly, concept and contents of urban amenities are analyzed. Then, based on this index system of evaluating urban amenities is constructed. While in the case study, the eight cities along the Yangtze River are selected to compare and evaluate their urban amenities by the aid of principle components analysis. The order of aggregate score is Nanjing (0.411), Suzhou(0.368),Wuxi(0.364)Changzhou (0.279), Yangzhou (-0.027), Zhenjiang (-0.336), Taizhou (-0.495 )and Nantong(-0.564).