Understanding Smart City Practice in Urban China: A Governance Perspective

Abstract

Through an evolution from an emerging marketing narrative to a geographical fact around the globe, smart city is increasingly understood as a city’s effort to make itself smart. There seems no single city in the world to be commonly recognized as a real smart city yet, albeit many cities have already tried hard in this missionary commitment. Yet some common features can still be seen and identified, particularly from the urban governance perspective. This article explores the practice of smart city construction in China through a lens of governance by observing the interactive involvement of key stakeholders in the process. By taking three cities (Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Shanghai) in China as study cases, a conceptual framework is established in which three sets of actors, i.e., ICT-related enterprises, government, and civil society, and, accordingly, three types of approaches, i.e., ICT-led, planning-led, and place-making-and-community-oriented, are identified. It is found that the evolution of smart city construction rather follows a nonlinear trajectory and is very dependent on whether or not the primary actors and related stakeholders can form an affirmative acting power in triggering the city’s implementation. In other words, there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to smart city construction. Each city may have its specialization in smartness based on awareness of and respecting its unique existing setting. The empirical study also shows that smart city construction tends to be converged in recognition that the core of smart city is not the smartness of technology but the smartness of all institutions and people enabled to utilize smart tools properly and efficiently in pursuit of people’s well-being, institutional capacity building, and better spatial arrangement towards a sustainable, resilient, and inclusive city in and for the future. From a geographical perspective, that is how to build a smart urban space to make the city a better place to not just accommodate but facilitate and meet people’s increasing demand for a better life in their living places.

1. Introduction

The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed the smart city’s change from an emerging marketing narrative to a geographical fact around the globe [1]. Particularly for developing countries that are still en route to meeting the basic needs of all citizens by building capital-intensive new infrastructures and upgrading their economic structure in a resource-efficient manner [1,2], disruptive innovations in technology not only have them seeing the possibility of “being on the same starting line” with other developed countries but force them to independently face an unknown future with increasing uncertainties and rapid/radical changes. In this context, the concept of smart city is increasingly understood as a city’s effort to make itself smart [3]. The focus of recent research on smart city development is therefore shifting from a passive description of status or general situation of how smart a city is to an active pursuit of the strategy that embeds the planning process in the material and socio-cultural context, especially in the issues of local everyday life [4] to generate a better understanding of the essential evolution process of smart city construction across the world.

China falls into this transitional process, offering an interesting and distinct case in pursuing its smart city construction and development practice. After the publication of “Smart Cities in China” by IBM in 2009 [5], the vision of smart city construction proposed by IBM seamlessly agreed upon and was adopted into Chinese governments’ commitment to switching the socioeconomic and spatial development from an extensive mode with high-speed expansion to a quality-oriented approach with inclusive benefit to all (As reported by China Daily in 2010, China’s vision of smart city construction was firstly promoted through IBM’s commitment in (i) holding 22 forums in 2009 to exchange opinions and experiences with more than 200 city mayors; (ii) cooperating in fields of food safety, electrical power, medical services, water resources, transportation, and service-oriented government; and (iii) sponsoring, designing an integrated information system, and providing an information-based consultation and service platform for Shanghai Expo. Retrieved from: https://bylinetimes.com/2019/05/24/smart-cities-and-automated-racism-how-ibm-designed-chinas-surveillance-regime/ (Accessed on 22 August 2022). This fundamental shift started in 2014 when the National New Urbanization Plan (2014–2020) was formally launched by the State Council. As China’s urbanization rate officially exceeded 60% in 2019, it has been estimated to reach 80% by 2050 [6] or even much earlier given that its demographic momentum slowed down, and a negative increase already occurred in 2022. This implies a huge potential for market growth of smart city construction and development in China as a higher proportion of people will live in urban areas.

Unlike Europe and North America where smart urbanism was driven by neoliberalism, entrepreneurship, or competitive strategy [7], smart city initiatives in China follow a strategic framework chosen by the central power following a top-down approach [8,9]. Since 2011, various national ministries in China have launched pilot programs on smart city construction with each program focusing on different fields (Figure 1). By 2022, the central government has been piloting and promoting smart city as a national strategy for 10 years, as a result of which 100% of sub-provincial cities (4 in total), 89.6% of prefecture-level cities (293 in total), and 62.8% of county-level cities (395 in total) have formulated plans for smart city construction as a pilot city designated by various national authorities (Up to date, the national authorities that have initiated smart-city-related pilot programs/projects with different focuses are as follows: (i) Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, focusing on planning and built environment; (ii) Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, addressing promoting industrial growth; (iii) National Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, focusing on infrastructures for GIS and big data; (iv) Ministry of Science and Technology, aiming to encourage technological innovation; (v) National Development and Reform Commission, accelerating social-economic transformation; and (vi) Ministry of Transport, experimenting on autonomous driving). However, the practice of smart city construction in China is not homogeneous, as each city interprets smart city in a different way when the local settings are taken into consideration, including the city’s geographical condition, economic development stage, residents living standard, social culture, etc. Furthermore, the city’s resource structure, political structure, financial capacity, and people’s actions further diversify the local practices [4].

Obviously, no matter if in a Chinese or a global context, there is no “one-size-fits-all” strategy for smart cities. However, a knowledge-based local practice has been unprecedentedly enhanced across the globe. In this context, China’s specific experiences borne from each city may provide good references to other cities in developing worlds, particularly for those cities in countries with similar strong planning mentality and practices as in China.

The goal of this work is to help better understand China’s “actual existing smart city [1]” as a “system”, considering its universal features together with specific aspects influencing the “system”. The proposed goal is based on the fact that the existing scientific literature on smart city has focused on innovative developments in ICT and its consequences for urban life and policymaking [3], leaving behind how cities’ local contexts and practices will accurately interact with technologies and policy processes.

Consequently, our research questions are as follows:

• RQ1—Is the development of “actual existing smart city” following a similar pattern or rather a nonlinear trajectory (which implies that the structure, operational mechanism, and development pathway of smart city are profoundly reshaped by those diversified interactions between adaptive agents and their environment)?
• RQ2—How do the interactions between different actors influence the planning and implementation process of smart city construction?
• RQ3—Looking to the future, which approach better represents the development direction of smart city?

To answer these research questions, we conduct descriptive and qualitative research on China’s smart city practices. From the literature analysis, it emerges that as “a process of coupled change between practices, values, and the biophysical environment [10,11]”, the evolution of the smart city is rather complex and diversified in practice. Therefore, we attempt to conduct a conceptual framework to capture both the common components and the specific approach of each city. From this intention, we conduct three case studies of China’s smart city practices, i.e., Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Shanghai, to better understand the “actually existing smart city” practice as a co-evolution process, focusing on how the key actors participate in the process of planning and implementation. Through comprehensive discussions, a general framework of smart city co-evolution from a planning and governance perspective is established, which can be used to identify the typology of smart city development patterns and their specific characteristics.

The aim of case studies is not to encompass the whole picture but to provide evidence to reflect the complexity of the evolution. This article will be structured as follows: Section 2 will conduct the international literature review; Section 3 will present the research methodology; Section 4 will illustrate the evolutionary processes and patterns of the planning and implementation for the three case cities in their smart city practice; Section 5 will summarize the major characteristics and interrelationship of the three patterns; finally, Section 6 will conclude with policy implications and suggestions for further work.

2. Smart City: Technology, Planning, and HET System

Smart city has far richer connotations compared with its analogous concepts (such as intelligent city, innovative city, wired city, digital city, creative city, etc.) defining the competitiveness of cities in different ways. Specifically, the conceptual focus shifted from dealing with ICT drivers in the 1990s to promoting social aspects of urban development [12]: human capital [13,14], citizen services [15], urban management [16], etc. Giffinger et al. group the characteristics of smart cities into six dimensions including smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment, and smart living [17]. Additionally, it has been comprehensively interpreted by Nam et al. as a strategy-oriented evolutionary process driven by interactions between technology, institution, and humans [3].

2.1. Technology

As explosively growing data and information are becoming “the raw material of the 21st century” [18] for city development, the progressive transformation of urban regional systems caused by applications of information and communication technologies (ICT) has been discussed basically from two perspectives: (i) promotion of communication across fields, departments, industries, and territories. Based on Web 2.0, mobile phone APPs, and new GIS, etc., platforms are established to get various actors connected and self-organized [19]; and (ii) generation of user-oriented solutions thus progressively promoting transformation in institutions, decision-making, governance, and business modes [20]. As a result, the great potential of ICTs to promote the economy, mobility, environment, people, and living standards [21,22,23] has been released in spurts. In other words, cities are becoming smarter in their daily operation and management through utilizing and running the platforms. However, while addressing the past inherent crises, ICT solutions were also questioned for creating new vulnerabilities concerning the protection of privacy and the digital gap [24].

2.2. Planning

In terms of planning, there seems to exist a blurring and fusion tendency between smart city initiatives and urban planning [3]. Planning, in a broad sense, refers to the phenomenon of a series of activities in pursuit of a set goal being deployed in an orderly manner [16,25]. Through a long and in-depth critical discussion of the complexity and uncertainty of the planning and implementation process, numerous scholars argue that whether a plan can be assessed as a successful one or not cannot be simply determined by the conformance between the expected goals and the results of policy implementation but depends on whether the involvement and interaction of different actors can bring positive effects to ultimately promoting the sustainable development of the city [25,26,27]. In this context, the planning of smart city involves the smartness of organizationally and institutionally adopting and embedding new technology-based solutions into the consistent pursuit of the future viability and prosperity of cities.

Different from “orthodox” paradigms of urban planning, smart city planning has been proven by many empirical studies to be more diverse, nonlinear, and progressive. For instance, Dowling et al. [28] examine related policies and mechanisms in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, finding that piecemeal initiatives rather than smart city strategies predominate in both two cities. An empirical research work developed in South Italy by Battarra et al. [29] find that critically incorporating technologies in complex policies/initiatives is significant for making smart initiatives coordinated and well-connected experiences and claim it as a more feasible approach in South-European contexts. Sadowski et al. [30] put forward three modes of smart urbanism which often co-exist and self-organize in the same city, particularly stressing that what smart urbanism looks like in practice is in large part influenced by the existing spatial, cultural, and political contexts of cities [27]. Inevitably, this will result in a diversified smart city development landscape in which each city may have its roadmap towards a smart city.

2.3. Human–Earth Territorial System

The specificity of each city’s approach to smart city construction is closely associated with its specific context in urban systems, which reflects the accumulated result of the ever-changing interactions between humans and the earth [31,32]. As the most active and influential production of human–earth territorial systems (HET system) in a rapidly modernizing world, urban regional systems are self-organized complex systems characterized by governments, enterprises, and citizens being connected by diversified transportation, communication, and services [33]. Nevertheless, rapid growth and increasing extreme events have generated a variety of vulnerabilities and uncertainties that tend to jeopardize the economic and environmental sustainability of cities. In recent years, with the development of ICT, the internet, and social media, new discussions over HET systems have emerged, including the substitution of “space of flows” for “space of places” [34,35], interactions between the material and the virtual systems [36,37], and the emerging platform urbanism [38,39,40].

In retrospect, with an increasing focus on “people”, the smart city is no longer just about how a city uses smart technologies to improve its performance in certain areas/fields but, more importantly, is about how to reshape our current cities and gradually create new urban places by introducing ICT tools, making the city not only a good space for accommodating urban dwellers but an affective place where urban residents can attach their affection and enjoy a healthy and pleasant life. In other words, from a planning viewpoint, smart city construction is a process in which place-making-oriented development should be considered or even emphasized from the very beginning.

3. Methodology

The bases of this study are an extensive literature review of smart cities and inductive qualitative research in three major cities (Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Shanghai, as shown in Figure 2). The study uses observation of smart city projects and longitudinal analysis of the planning process at different stages, thereby explaining how related actors implemented and how the smart city strategies evolved. Triangulation check among different documents regarding the strategic steps, scopes, and focuses in each step is conducted to make sure the information and message are as correct as possible.

The selection of three case cities mainly came from the outcome of the analysis of (i) the nature of the national pilot categories in the city; (ii) planning and policy documents regarding smart city; (iii) industrial reports by leading ICT/consulting companies (both publicly available and privately acquired); (iv) assessments and recognition from third parties, in China mainly referring to research/reports from universities and research institutions; and (v) socio-economic statistics from public sectors (as a reference base to ensure the comparability of cities) [41,42,43,44,45,46].

4. The Evolution of Smart City Construction in the Three Case Cities

4.1. Hangzhou

Hangzhou, well-known for its thriving trade and prosperous commerce since the 1100s, is geographically close to ports along the Atlantic coast and is the southernmost end of the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal, a cultural heritage with a long history of mainly transferring rice from south China to the Capital city Beijing, apart from other trading business. At the end of the 20th century, an e-commerce company called Alibaba was headquartered in the city; then, in less than one decade, the company grew astonishingly into one of China’s largest Internet enterprises. As a result, talents, capital, and innovative activities across the country and the world have been attracted to Hangzhou, consequently promoting the agglomeration of related companies in the Internet, software, electronics manufacturing, etc. By 2021, the added value of Hangzhou’s digital economy reached 490.5 billion yuan (about 72.7 billion USD) at a growth rate of 11.5% annually, accounting for 27.1% of the city’s GDP [47], and up to 36 private enterprises have been enlisted in the “China Top 500 Private Enterprises”.

Although Hangzhou was not the first city in China to formally propose the smart city strategy, it has rich experience in collaborating with ICT companies to engage in the construction of digital infrastructure to improve the city’s management efficiency. For instance, Hikvision, the leading company of the local digital security industry cluster, has begun to assist the municipal public security department in building the IoT-oriented security system since 2009.

Another area where ICT solutions were deployed early was traffic management. In 2010, Hangzhou launched the “Intelligent Traffic Integrated Management and Control Platform” in its 32 ground traffic police squadrons within the city, aiming at improving the efficiency of intra-departmental collaboration by shortening the duty shift time from 10 min to 5 min. In 2013, combined with the video surveillance system, Hangzhou carried out a rectification movement against running red lights, which greatly enhanced citizens’ awareness of obeying traffic rules. Yet, ICT application was still not fully explored; the traffic congestion problem remained a big headache in Hangzhou as in many other big cities in the world.

However, 2016 was the turning point, when Alibaba Cloud launched its AI-based product named “City Brain” and introduced it into Hangzhou’s smart city construction. The project was led by the Hangzhou Municipal Government and coordinated by the Municipal Data Resources Bureau. Alibaba was contracted to lead and implement the project by forming a consortium body, of which Alibaba Cloud is responsible for designing the overall framework, building the core modules, and undertaking the subsequent operations, and other 13 companies such as Foxconn, YITU Technology, and Digital Dream Factory were responsible for or involved in developing other modules.

Traffic management has remained Hangzhou’s priority area in its application of the city brain and has conducted a series of experiments in the main urban area. The basic procedure was that traffic cameras obtain the traffic flow data and transfer them into the city brain system; then, through running the information analysis in the specific module with the data, the city brain can send the orders for automatically adjust the duration of the traffic light in each direction (Figure 3). In the first phase, the technology covered 128 signal intersections in the main urban area, monitoring them in real time around the clock, while in Xiaoshan District, a suburban district of Hangzhou, this technology was also combined with security and emergency treatment systems, such as offering ambulances and firefighting trucks the priority for passing through and providing firefighters with accurate information such as where are the nearest fire faucets from the fire points and where the gas pipelines are located and distributed. In 2017, Alibaba evaluated the implementation effect of the project over the past year and found that the average traffic travel time in the pilot area was 15.3% less, and the emergency alarm accuracy was 92% [48]. Additionally, reports published by TomTom show that Hangzhou’s ranking in the global traffic congestion level dropped from 16th in 2016 to 154th in 2019 [48,49].

Because of the encouraging results of the pilot application of City Brain in the transportation field, the Hangzhou municipal government approved the City Brain solution in its formal planning document and promoted to apply it in a city-wide region through a top-down manner. In 2019, the Hangzhou Municipal Development and Reform Commission clarified the infrastructure architecture of the city brain (Figure 4) in its Hangzhou Urban Data Brain Plan. The planning document also formulated a goal that traffic governance based on the city brain should cover the whole city by 2022 and expand from a single transportation field to multiple fields (such as urban management, health care, tourism, environmental protection, policing, etc.), to realize the integration of the data systems and improve the business collaboration [50]. For example, the city brain has realized the coordination of credit system, online payment, and municipal services, so residents can enjoy the “medical treatment first and pay later” through the hospital’s online system and the “leave first and pay later” service when using the city’s 335,000 parking spaces. Altogether, these convenient services from the City Brain system have greatly improved the operational efficiency of this megacity, with a population near 12 million in the 2020 census data.

This example illustrates how smart city planning and implementation in Hangzhou has evolved. Driven by the rising information technologies and their applications, Hangzhou’s smart city construction has formed an original path centered on the city brain, allowing it to quickly stand out among more than 300 prefectural level and above cities in China. Its successful practice has produced a strong demonstration effect at home and abroad and has been applied and localized in Shanghai, Suzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Haikou, Macao, and cities in Malaysia, France, etc. Remarkably, Hangzhou has also become an innovative base of smart solutions with the joint efforts of enterprises and government, such as the Health Code, a tracing system for people’s real-time traveling, which was widely applied in many Chinese cities for managing and mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in the past three years. The Code system was initially created and tested in Hangzhou with success in early 2020.

4.2. Wuhan

Wuhan, as China’s economic gravity center with a dominated government leadership, is a significant industrial, scientific, and transportation hub in central China and has always been a city whose transition is more or less dependent on the institutional power and government leadership. During China’s planned economy era, Wuhan was designated as an industrial city with a strong foundation in heavy industries such as steel and machinery manufacturing. Since the 1980s, the opening-up of coastal areas once put Wuhan at risk of being marginalized until the national strategic focus shifted to inland areas again in the 2000s. Since 2014, Wuhan’s tertiary industry has become a larger contributor to the city’s economy than the secondary industry. Moreover, Wuhan has 83 higher education institutions, 29 state key laboratories of science, 73 Academicians, and more than 100 national S&T innovation platforms. From the 1980s to the 1990s, local scholars successively proposed to the government authorities to develop the optoelectronic industry and semiconductor industry, and leaders of Wuhan at that time recognized the potential of the ICT industry and gave strong support, which laid the initial ground for fostering the city to become an optical fiber and memory chip manufacturing base after 2010. Wuhan is also a city hosting more college students than any city in the world with a total number of 1.68 million in 2022. According to the Nature Index released by Nature Publishing Group in 2022, Wuhan ranks 11th in the world Science Cities top [51].

Different from Hangzhou, Wuhan’s smart city construction continues its tradition of strong and ambitious leadership, particularly paying hard efforts in seeking policy support from the central government. In 2011, Wuhan was selected as one of the first two pilot cities in the “Smart City 863 Program”, launched by the Ministry of Science and Technology and later selected as a pilot city for the smart city project implementation respectively initiated by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, and the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping, and Geographic Information. Relying on the city’s innovation advantages in geo-space science and technology, Wuhan built a comprehensive city-wide spatiotemporal big data center, integrating basic information such as urban population, legal entity, housing, etc., into one platform, which can be accessed and utilized by more than 30 governmental departments including urban planning, land management, urban governance, and public services.

Besides appealing for funding and policy support from the national government, the Wuhan Municipal Government also tried hard to actively seek world-class design proposals from global institutions for smart city construction, but the results were not satisfactory. In 2013, the Administrative Committee of Wuhan Economic and Technological Development Zone (WHETDZ) signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Microsoft, spending 175 million yuan (26.0 million USD) to purchase Microsoft’s technology products and services for the construction and operation of cloud platforms. However, four years later when the products and services were supposed to be delivered, WHETDZ disappointedly knew that Microsoft’s smart city proposal was negatively assessed by a third-party organization as “unreasonable, infeasible and having huge systemic vulnerabilities”. Thus the project eventually turned into a commercial dispute that ended in 2017 with a financial loss for the local authority. The failure of this project brought many negative chain effects on Wuhan’s smart city construction. The municipal government had to be more cautious about digital infrastructure construction projects; thus, the implementation of building the central platform to connect the city’s databases to various fields was delayed, resulting in the existing databases being kept as “data chimneys” failing to maximize the value through an integrative platform service.

A turning point came in 2019 when the COVID-19 pandemic crisis broke out in Wuhan. With a consecutive lockdown for four months, Wuhan’s social and economic life stopped running. However, just two months after the city officially relieved the lockdown, the Wuhan Municipal Government released its “14th Five-Year Plan for New Smart Cities (2021–2025)” in June 2020. The new smart city plan was jointly designed by Tencent (China’s largest social network service provider with more than 1.2 billion users) and Fiberhome (a local-born Chinese leading company in telecommunications). Both of them have been cooperating with the municipal government for several years in smart city construction. According to the plan, a city brain-based technological model was adopted.

With huge databases established in previous pilot projects, the newly designed city brain platform has brought a multiplier effect for the co-creation of the information value through more accurate and timely services in various applications. The plan identified six key application fields, which are city infrastructure, data resources, e-government, public services, urban governance, and digital economy with the core emphasis on human-centered public service. For example, according to the plan, up to 20 AI-based elderly care communities will be built by 2025. Additionally, to optimize the spatial distribution of the public services, the city will build a new set of smart stadiums, football parks, greenways, and gyms so that all community residents can access them within a 12-min walking distance [52]. Another example of introducing existing geospatial databases into the development of applications is the Handi Cloud, which was launched on WeChat by the municipal department of natural resources management. Consistent with the requirements of land use in spatial planning, a list of available sites is publicly displayed in the “online land supermarket” to better serve developers and other stakeholders (Figure 5). This pioneering approach provided essential support to Wuhan’s economic recovery from the pandemic crisis by substantially enhancing the efficiency and transparency of government services both in land management and investment promotion.

4.3. Shanghai

Shanghai has the largest economy among the four provincial-level cities in China, with the most developed finance and the biggest port trade in Asia/the world. In the early 1990s, Pudong New Area, one of Shanghai’s 16 urban districts, was designated by the national government as a “window of China’s reform and opening-up” for piloting a series of special economic policies, which created an inclusive institutional environment for facilitating and boosting the development of industries, innovation, and society. In 2010, the cooperation between the local government and IBM for the World Expo made Shanghai the first city in China to practically introduce the concept of smart city. In 2017, the Shanghai Municipal Government issued the Shanghai Urban Master Plan (2017–2035), repositioning the city as “the international economic, financial, trade and shipping center”, plus “ the S&T innovation center” [53]. In 2021, Shanghai’s GDP reached 4321.5 billion yuan (637.1 billion USD), exceeding that of London and Paris for the first time, with the annual growth rates of major innovation-intensive industries (ICT, digital creative industries, new energy, biology, and high-end manufacturing) all exceeding 10%. Shanghai’s vision for smart city construction traced back to 2010 when Shanghai hosted the World Expo partnership with IBM. The concept of smart city caught the attention of the municipal government and was introduced into Shanghai’s urban planning well before the concept was adopted as a national strategy in China. From 2011 to 2020, the Shanghai government formulated three consecutive rounds of action plans to promote smart city construction:

• 2011–2013: To activate the development of the ICT industry and expand the coverage of information infrastructure [54];
• 2014–2016: To build a comprehensive structure for smart city construction covering four significant components: application, information infrastructure, ICT industry, and network security [55];
• 2016–2020: To specifically promote the applications in five fields (smart living, smart economy, smart governance, smart government, and smart districts) through the continuous upgrading of information infrastructure [56].

The planning objectives of Shanghai’s smart city construction were very clear at each stage. The first round of planning focused on stimulating the development of the information technology industry, inherited from its previous strategy launched at the end of 2009 that Shanghai took the Internet of Things as the city’s priority industry. The second round of planning shifted the focus from the single-type industry to a systematic design. One of the important driving forces was the Pudong New Area being designated as “National Smart City Pilot” by the Ministry of Construction (the former Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Construction) in 2013. To review the implementation effect of the plan, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Information Technology has organized relevant units to annually evaluate the development of smart cities since 2013 and published the evaluation results to the public every year. The core of the third round of planning was to establish a spontaneous feedback mechanism between industries, infrastructure, and civil society by creating a smart application ecosystem. This was to respond to the national government’s initiative and requirement to build smart cities centered on people’s benefits.

ICT companies provided the needed technical support for each stage: (i) in the first stage, three major telecommunications operators including China Mobile, Unicom, and Telecom played a key role in the construction of the IoT infrastructure; (ii) in the second stage, Internet companies became key players in cooperation with the municipal government to develop E-payment systems to help business operations and people’s daily life; and (iii) in the third stage, a deeper strategic cooperation relationship between municipal government and the ICT leading companies such as Ali and Huawei was established and developed to ensure the most cutting-edge ICT-based products/services (i.e., AI, smart terminals, etc.) and a wider range of ICT innovation can be captured, absorbed, and implemented in the first place into Shanghai’s smart city construction. Through building the socio-economic innovative ecosystem in the past ten years, Shanghai has harvested a lot of experience in pursuing smart city construction, particularly in technical application and institutional innovation practice. According to the evaluation report released by Shanghai Economic and Information Commission in 2020 [57], Shanghai’s performance in the vertical fields of urban governance, industrial Internet, medical services, and 5G infrastructure occupied the world’s leading place.

Yet, the “information cocoons" [58] hassle, a problem commonly faced by numerous cities and derived from the platform’s incomplete integrations between various subsystems, remains the major challenge for Shanghai. Especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, municipal government fully recognized the bad necessity for constructing a highly integrated platform connecting all stakeholders and activities in a super-large city such as Shanghai presently with a population of more than 24 million. By building the platform “Shanghai’s Government Online/Offline“ for public services and the system “One Network Unifies Management” for urban operations, Shanghai’s provision of public services and infrastructure at the community level has been instantly optimized by adopting a large number of inclusive people-centric facilities and solutions under government procurement. For example, the installation of smart taxi-hailing devices along streets, which allows the elderly to call taxis more easily by simply pointing destinations to go on a big screen pad, has been promoted throughout the city after being piloted in communities of Changning District (Figure 6), presenting an important milestone in Shanghai’s commitment towards the ever-stressed proposition for a “People’s city, of the people, by the people, and for the people”.

5. Discussions

Generally speaking, the three city cases in this article well represent the typical situations of smart city pursuing in China in terms of governance and planning practices; thereby, a conceptual framework exhibiting three prevailing patterns of smart city construction with different primary actors and motivations is emerging (

Table 1. Approaches, actors, and motivations in smart city construction.

Approaches	Primary Actors	Motivations
Technology-driven	ICT-related companies	Innovative information technologies and intensive capital investment in ICT industries provide the initial driving force for implementing the smart city strategy
Planning-driven	Governments	National and local governments actively adopt smart city concept and construction into institutional capacity building and their planning commitments to realize the city’s strategic development goal
Public demand-driven	The civil society	Enhancing public intrinsic motivation by raising residents’ awareness and demand for a more convenient and better living through applying smart facilities in the smart city construction

). For a technology-driven approach, ICT-related companies usually take the dominant role in initiating smart city construction through innovative technologies and capital investment with minor/limited involvement/interference from the government, such as in the case of Hangzhou. For a planning-driven approach, the local government and its departments dominate the process from the very beginning by actively introducing smart city concept into institutional capacity building and their planning commitments to realize the city’s strategic development goal, such as in the case of Wuhan. For a public demand-driven approach, the general public (mainly composed of academia, the private sector, social entrepreneurs and activists, and civic society [59]) play the dominant role in keeping the needs of urban residents always regarded as the top priority in designing any platforms and adopting any new technologies/facilities; people tend to voice for themselves in the process while the government and ICT companies are also actively involved, such as in the case of Shanghai.

As a typical representative of the technology-driven approach, the case of Hangzhou shows that a good relationship between these local ICT giants and the government is critical for the city to efficiently build a smart urban management system through the construction of advanced ICT-based platforms (City Brain). The initial innovators of technological applications in Hangzhou came from its thriving local ICT ecosystem anchored by Alibaba and other key ICT firms. As shown above, application of the platform was successful and brought benefits to the city in many ways. However, albeit local authorities made efforts to balance market interests and public values in the application, the fast expansion of information capital still causes some negative externalities. For example, with the expansion of computing power demand, the construction of data centers has led to a surge in power consumption. Thus, the local authority issued a policy document in 2020 to control the number of data centers in the city and withdraw financial support, as the government initially did, for house renting, electricity, and water consumption. Another challenge is that the capacity building of government is not systematic, resulting in some conflicts in decision-making between government departments. For example, Hangzhou is far behind its counterparts in adopting smart meters system that can remotely record the consumption of water and electricity. This is not because of any technical difficulties but because of the dispute on data ownership. Neither the bureau of water nor the bureau of electricity want to expose their data to each other. This implies that a city with advanced smart platforms may not automatically become a smart city by itself if a comprehensively smart system is not in place.

As a typical representative of the planning-driven approach, the case of Wuhan exhibits how an entrepreneurial government is learning from its practice of promoting smart city construction to address the increasing uncertainties of the city and meanwhile strengthen the city’s competitiveness and identity. Smart city strategy in Wuhan was initially regarded as a panacea for activating industrial growth. Due to a lack of clear and practical vision, policymakers are inclined to be over-optimistic about ICTs. However, the trials and errors of smart city projects, as well as the hardship of the COVID-19, finally became a trigger to have the government rethink and utilize ICT tools more practically. For example, the government built its planning supportive system by utilizing the existing GIS resources in the city. Through promoting spatiotemporal data analysis, the city’s institutional smartness was greatly enhanced such as in housing management, approval of construction projects, and transparency of land auction and bidding. Accordingly, policymakers’ and citizens’ attitude and vision toward the application of smart technologies in green city development becomes more practical and clearer. Thus, in the latest Wuhan Spatial Plan (2021–2035), the city has set its vision as a resilient city through the smart application of smart technologies.

In the case of Shanghai, public society plays a more important role in smart city construction under the ideology of “better city, better life” which originated from the theme of the Shanghai World Expo held in 2010. Thus, a well-balanced interaction mechanism between public society, policymakers, and ICT companies was engendered from the very beginning, in which the smart city construction was not only to address the challenges born from the fragmented resource-environment complexes but to formulate an intelligent urban organism with inclusion [6], reflexivity [60], and iterability [61] for making better living places for urban residents based on their changing demands. In this process, smart city planning not only functions as a toolbox to enhance the capacities and authorities of governments but as an engine to profoundly reconstruct a city’s endogenous dynamics in a smarter way. All these good ideas and visions regarding smart city planning have been well reflected in Shanghai’s latest released 14th Five-Year Plan for Urban Digital Transformation (2021–2025). Supported by Huawei, an internationally leading enterprise in telecommunications equipment-making and services, this plan aims to construct a highly integrated digital network composed of companies, institutions, communities, and residents from all walks of life in 5 years [62]. However, communities in Shanghai still fell into chaos with the established smart system due to the pandemic outbreak in the spring of 2021. The failure of urban management in crisis time made the whole city rethink its strategy for smart city planning and implementation. An affirmative recognition is gradually coming into being that the current smart city planning system should be updated and facilitated to enhance its emergency response capacities in crisis time through the collaboration of all related stakeholders.

Despite each case having its upsides and downsides, the above three representative cities reflect the typical, or more accurately, benchmark approaches to promoting multi-actor involvement and interactions in China within the scope of the state-of-the-art technology. In terms of the evolution process, the roles played by governments, ICT companies, and the general public vary obviously among the three cities. In this context, leading actors, focal aspects and main characteristics of each category can be further summarized.

5.1. ICT-Led Approach

The ICT-led approach is the most fundamental and widely adopted category of smart city (

Table 2. Actors’ practices of ICT-led approach in China smart city construction.

Actors	Aspects	Characteristics
★ ICT companies	ICT-based solutions	Influential leading enterprises Prosperous local industrial ecosystem Public–private partnership
	ICT infrastructure	Supply chain management enhanced Financial and credit systems required
Governments	Urban experiment	Piloting and replication in urban management Limited intervention
	Urban management	Improving the business environment and providing services for enterprises City marketing and competitiveness come to be an important concern
Civil society	Public services	Service purchase and experience Feedback for the adopted solutions Subtle changes in residents’ cognition, behavior, lifestyle, culture, etc.
	Data	Generation/banking/analysis of data Privacy and information security rising

Note: “★” refers to the dominant actor in each approach.

). The high initiative of the leading enterprise is critical for kicking off the local industrial ecosystem and public–private partnership in facilitating disruptive innovation of ICT-based solutions, while good systems of supply chain, financial, and credit management are required for sustaining and upgrading the construction of ICT infrastructure. Governments, as purchasers of ICT-based products and services, apply new technologies into pilot projects, business environment improvement, and city marketing through limited intervention. The role of the civil society is the group of ultimate service/product consumers on the one hand and data-providers on the other.

5.2. Planning-Led Approach

The emergence of the planning-led approach is usually related to the saturation of technological development (

Table 3. Actors’ practices of planning-led approach in China smart city construction.

Actors	Aspects	Characteristics
ICT companies	Building platforms	Extensive coverage of various fields High accessibility for all groups of residents
	Business patterns	Operation-oriented Localization of imported solutions/experience
★ Governments	PSS and policymaking	Data-driven decision-making Optimizing the approval procedures Supervision of plan implementation
	Techno-rationalism and multi-stakeholder involvement	Accurate and practical identification of priorities Collaborative innovation by bringing together enterprises, research institutes, and media Elevating the efficiency and transparency of government–business relationships
Civil society	Citizen-centric design with inclusion, equity, and empowerment	Highly qualified human capital Inclusive design Improving the supply of infrastructures and public services at the community level
	Aggregation of multi-source data	Management of natural resources Capacity building in emergency response

Note: “★” refers to the dominant actor in each approach.

). In this period, public authorities are the most influential actors, to whom technologies not only bring innovative organizational and management methods but also bring advanced awareness and values of governance. The efficiency of urban management and governance will be greatly elevated through deep integration of technologies, planning, and policy tools. In face of companies and the general public, institutional and governance factors become the primary aspects reshaping technological innovation, specialization, and public value orientation. For instance, ensuring the high accessibility of information and ICT services to all groups of residents and enterprises is vital in promoting smart city construction. In the meantime, factors such as human capital, inclusive design, community, and emergency response capacity are particularly emphasized.

5.3. Placemaking-and-Community-Oriented Approach

The connotation of placemaking-and-community-oriented approach is that when the coupling between technological breakthroughs and institutional innovation reaches a high level, multi-stakeholder collaboration and innovative activities are penetrated into everyday life practices, which promote the sinking of digital tools to the micro-level urban spaces, accelerating the circulation of knowledge, innovation, and talents, and thereby transforming the evolution of the built environment of urban system from disorder to order (

Table 4. Actors’ practices of placemaking-and-community-oriented approach in China smart city construction.

Actors	Aspects	Characteristics
ICT companies	Urban digital transformation	Integrated technological structure (e.g., the “Cloud-Channel-Device” pattern) Companies as both beneficiaries and participants in smart city construction
	Regional innovation ecosystem	Supportive industry alliances Innovation facilitated through a self-organization and open system
Governments	Institutional smartness	Flexibility of multi-department collaboration
	Governance innovation	Online–offline integrated management Bulk procurement of inclusive solutions
★ The Civil society	Resilience, sustainability, and comprehensive competitiveness	Social innovation of people-centric solutions Transforming from fragmented resource-environment complexes to organisms with inclusion, reflexivity, and iterability.
	Demand-driven living systems	Building a highly integrated network covering all actors and activities in the city Grid-based affective governance of communities

Note: “★” refers to the dominant actor in each approach.

). In terms of the governments, institutional smartness and the innovation ecosystem are the fundamental requirements for multi-stakeholder involvement. A people-centric and demand-driven living system is progressively constructed.

The three approaches to smart city evolution are not immutable. Figure 7 shows the interrelationship between the three approaches in the co-evolution process. On the whole, by comparing the state of a city before and after, it will be found that the planning and implementation of smart city strategy generally follows a nonlinear evolution roadmap from ICT-led, planning-led to place-making-and-community-oriented as illustrated in Figure 8, reflecting roughly a progressive and organic stage of smart city evolution. Initially, at the first stage, ICTs usually have instant effects in supporting the activities of governments and facilitating the citizens. However, without the alignment between technologies, governments, and civil society, the expected smartness of the urban system will not be fully realized. Thus, at the second stage, the right intervention of government and better planning are badly needed. More than that, the core of a smart city is not merely the smartness of technology but the smartness of all institutions and people to utilize tools properly and efficiently in pursuit of well-being and institutional capacity building towards a sustainable, resilient, and inclusive city. Then, at the third stage, a comprehensive approach is more important in realizing the city’s overall smartness.

In retrospect, despite the case of Shanghai exhibiting the organic evolution process towards smart city in a more mature and orderly manner, Hangzhou and Wuhan’s cases show that. in the short and medium term. cities still can activate their smart city construction from any stage directly without rigidly following the general path. However, in the long run, Shanghai’s approach seems more sustainable, particularly when urban renewal and redevelopment of cultural heritage areas is concerned, in which more stakeholders with interest conflicts and historical components are intertwined in a rather complicated way [63,64].

6. Conclusions

The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed the smart city changing from an emerging marketing narrative to a geographical fact around the globe. For China, smart city initiatives generally follow a strategic framework configured by the central government and implemented through a top-down approach. However, the research in this article shows that the local practice is rather diverse in approaches and variegated in patterns. Each city is making its own efforts to explore the most suitable way for its smart city construction based on its local endowments, development status, and even cultural settings including the institutional framework. From a governance and planning perspective, there seems to be emerging in China a strong blurring and fusion tendency between smart city initiatives and smart urban planning.

In response to the research questions put forward in Part 1, this article mainly forms the following conclusions:

First, the navigation of three cities’ practices in smart city construction confirms the early study conclusion from the other literature that smart city development follows a nonlinear trajectory and is rather a co-evolutionary process, in which the interaction between different primary actors plays a decisive role in determining the city’s approach and pattern in its commitment to the smart city pursuit.

Second, the planning and implementation of smart city strategy generally follow an evolution roadmap from ICT-led, planning-led to space-producing- and place-making-oriented as shown in Figure 8, yet there is no one-fits-all approach in smart city construction. Cities may seek their specialization in one of the smartness dimensions and find their specific approach.

Third, the progress of smart city construction is very much dependent on whether or not the primary actors and related stakeholders can form an affirmative acting power to promote the mission. Because of this, the co-evolutionary process varies from city to city, and their ever-changing status in smart city performance cannot be linearly expected and foreseen.

Fourth, multi-stakeholder involvement can eventually contribute to place restoration and place-making to create public value, and this implies a much more livable, viable, and humanistic picture of smart city construction patterns with a particularly refined focus on small space units at the district/community level within the city. Taking Wuhan as an instance, the renewal and renovation of the over-100-year-old Jianghan Road Pedestrian Street since 2018 was an outstanding benchmark of the ingenious combination between smart technologies and the revitalization of historical heritages. Besides new industries and business patterns, the cohesive urban fabric, the spatial organization, the traditional architectural characteristics, the continuity of skyline and facades’ patterns, the transformation of land use, and the implications of socio-demographic transformations should also be taken into consideration [63,64]. In this sense, the case study in this article is merely a tentative exploration at a city level rather than a community level.

As for suggestions for future works, two immediate pieces of research can be conducted following this article. The first is a more objective study of the typology of smart city development. Although based on our rich experiences in China’s urbanization study and our long-term observation of China’s city development, the selection of case cities in this article is rather subjective. Additionally, those aspects and characteristics identified from the three cases are far from covering all specific practices of smart city development in China, especially taking into account the great disparities between individual cities in their endowments of ICT industries, population, and culture settings in such a vast country. Because of this difference in local conditions, each city may explore its specialization in one of the smartness dimensions [17]. In this sense, more evidence-based research on the topic is called for. If considering the dramatic fast pace of the technology iteration in information technologies such as AI, IoT, Metaverse, Blockchains, and Digital Twins and their wide applications in smart city planning and construction, this kind of research is indeed urgently and badly needed. The second is the case study of smart city construction at the community level, with a particular focus on how “smartness” is being progressively achieved within a city through joint efforts and alignment between technologies, local authorities, and civil society. From a planning and governance perspective, a participatory theory on smart city evolution might be engendered if more systematic research following this article’s suit can be further conducted both in a wider scope and in-depth way.

Finally, there are two aspects of policy implications for China’s smart city construction in the future. First, besides the practical experience from China providing a baseline or benchmark for an international comparison of smart city planning and implementation, the experiences and lessons from the three case cities may bring trajectory references to metropolitan areas in developing countries (especially to new economies with huge populations and strong but less efficient institutional leadership). Second, existing evidence validating that smart city evolution in China follows a nonlinear trajectory implies that each city has its own approach due to its different local settings, and there is no uniform pattern to be replicated; this explains why copying experiences of other cities in a rigid way may give rise to financial and environmental risks. Third, it can help policymakers reach more insightful findings concerning those links between smart city and urban sustainable development, two concepts the existence of whose commonalities has been universally recognized [65]—in fact, it is extremely urgent—especially in a time that is dictated by a need to shift to a more sustainable techno-social paradigm to adverse repercussions of a resource-intensive and unthoughtfully opportunistic livability philosophy that does not look far into the future [66].