A Load-Carrier Perspective Method for Investigating Urban Public Service Carrying Capacity

The dramatic growth of urban population has made cities vulnerable in terms of achieving sustainable development and providing comfortable living standards for urban inhabitants. Under this background, more and more researchers begin to pay attention to the study of urban carrying capacity (UCC). However, public services carrying capacity, as an indispensable component of UCC, have not been systematically investigated. Previous studies have applied various methods to evaluate public services. They tent to regard the public services as a public product, while public services are one of the essential components of urban system, rather than a mere product, which should be studied as an important social resource. Therefore, this study introduces a load-carrier perspective method for investigating urban public service carrying capacity (UPSCC). The demonstration of four municipalities is used for the application of the innovative method. The demonstration shows that the carrying degree of urban public services of four municipalities is acceptable, and still have great potential to improve. The result of demonstration suggests that the load-carrier perspective method introduced in this study is able to help measure UPSCC.