Abstract
Smart cities link the city services, citizens, resource and infrastructures together and form the heart of the modern society. As a “smart” ecosystem, smart cities focus on sustainable growth, efficiency, productivity and environmentally friendly development. By comparing with the European Union, North America and other countries, smart cities in China are still in the preliminary stage. This study offers a comparative analysis of ten smart cities in China on the basis of an extensive database covering two time periods: 2005–2007 and 2008–2010. The unsupervised computational neural network self-organizing map (SOM) analysis is adopted to map out the various cities based on their performance. The demonstration effect and mutual influences between these ten smart cities are also discussed by using social network analysis. Based on the smart city performance and cluster network, current problems for smart city development in China were pointed out. Future research directions for smart city research are discussed at the end this paper.
Highlights
As a system of systems, modern cities link the city services, citizens, energy system, water system, communication system, transport system and business together by providing the location and stimulus for learning, creative thinking, entrepreneurial spirit, socio-economic progress, new technologies development and ecologically sustainable transformation [1,2]
Similar to other National Development Plans, the Chinese government would like to select and invest in pilot cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, to lead smart city development within the whole country. This top-down driven process makes the formation of smart city cluster network in China different with other areas—policy learning and related mutual influences are common between different cities
Once the training stage is completed, there are two approaches for exploring the information provided by a trained self-organizing map (SOM) [3]: the first one is to compare the network created with the original input vectors; the second one is to link the original data on the network using the best matching unit (BMU) for each vector
Summary
As a system of systems, modern cities link the city services, citizens, energy system, water system, communication system, transport system and business together by providing the location and stimulus for learning, creative thinking, entrepreneurial spirit, socio-economic progress, new technologies development and ecologically sustainable transformation [1,2]. With the development of modern technology in everyday urban life, cities are increasingly moving from “sense of place”—a collection of static infrastructures—to a “place of senses”—a dynamic and evolving smart ecosystem known as digital cities, intelligent cities, high-tech district, virtual cities, information cities, wired cities, creative cities and knowledge-based cities [3,4,5,6,7,8]. Similar to other National Development Plans, the Chinese government would like to select and invest in pilot cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, to lead smart city development within the whole country. This top-down driven process makes the formation of smart city cluster network in China different with other areas—policy learning and related mutual influences are common between different cities. A deep discussion on the mutual influences and demonstration effects of different cities will be needed to understand the cluster network in China, which could help to identify the strengths and weaknesses of these cities
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