<p>Contemporary urban development is a multifaceted system that includes economic, social, and environmental factors. A reasonable assessment approach is essential to accurately represent the present condition of urban development and to inform future growth trajectories. Multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) integrates evaluative information from numerous experts across diverse criteria to provide rational solutions, making it common in practical decision-making and assessment contexts. This study initially presents a flexible extended prioritized average (EPA) operator in a multi-parameter format to address the restrictions inherent in the form-conservative character of the prioritized average (PA) operator. Besides, the complex fuzzy Z-number (CFZN) can delineate the reliability and periodicity of the evaluated object. Thus, within the CFZN framework, this paper develops four aggregation operators (AOs) for information fusion based on Frank T-norms and T-conorms and verifies their fundamental properties: idempotence, monotonicity, and boundedness. To ascertain the objective weights of experts and criteria, a divergence measure is developed to quantify discrepancies between CFZNs. Moreover, this study makes use of the stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) approach to methodically assess the subjective weights of the criteria. In the end, the proposed operators are incorporated with the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) approach to establish an innovative MCGDM framework and apply it in a comprehensive evaluation of urban development over multiple dimensions. Furthermore, sensitivity and comparative analyses confirm the robustness and efficacy of our strategy, indicating its better performance.</p>