Medium-hot take: sustainable cities really wouldn't need that much steel at all. The optimal height for residential buildings is about how many stories you can climb without being winded, and you can do this with timber and brick.

Cities will never be sustainable if they replicate the paradigm of enabling each individual's presumed desire to accumulate personal or private property to fill every need. Switching to universal access to everything, rather than ownership, is the biggest step. Once you do that, dwellings don't need to be as big, yards can be pooled together, there will be a shorter distance to everything, and production requirements for virtually everything will dramatically drop.

You can have a sophisticated and sustainable city with mostly 1700s-level technology.

farmers do this, I have never had better produce or food than when I'm eating near where stuff is grown

The Ea-Nasir school of selling metal: the good stuff goes to the state, sell the cheap shit to the private collectors, laugh when the latter get what they paid for

I live in a region in Brazil known for the steel industry, and when I asked people who work in the industry or working with industries that consume the steel, they said that the Chinese stainless steel in particular is inferior.

the modern stuff is on par with western products because that's what they had to do to appeal to western consumers and manufacturers

It's what they had to do to appeal to Chinese customers and manufacturers. China is eclipsing Western consumer markets as fast as they're manufacturing outlets.

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Given the large share of chinese steel consumption being in construction and infrastructure, we don't need to worry too much about the jevon's effect. Once the country fully develops, steel demand will naturally be cut.

It's a continuous process, think of a conveyor belt. If the conveyor belt is 3 feet long or 3 miles long, the rate you can put things on it is the same.