Nowadays, urbanisation has become an inevitable worldwide trend, especially in China, which is experiencing rapid urbanisation. Understanding the relationship between city size and resource consumption is necessary to achieve a transition to sustainable development. This paper took a typical rapidly urbanising city, Xiamen, as a case study to analyse relationships between resource consumption and city size in the course of rapid urbanisation. The best-fit curve estimation models were chosen for analysis. The average, derivative and elasticity functions were then solved and plotted. The results revealed differentmodes for resource use with city-scale growth. An availability, accessibility and scale framework was proposed for analysis,and the implications for sustainable urbanisation are discussed.