Abstract
China is at the midpoint of its urbanisation—the largest scale in human history. The recent smart city movement is influencing the discourse and practice of China’s urbanisation, with numerous cities claiming to build smart cities and/or adopting some forms of smart city strategies and initiatives. A so-called ‘latecomer’s advantage’ is being exploited to advance their pursuit for a smart city status, not only to catch up with overseas counterparts, but to overtake them and become international leaders. This local-level enthusiasm strikes a chord with the central government’s strategy of building an ‘innovative nation’ to drive its economic transformation towards a knowledge economy. This converging central-local interest is creating a ‘smart city mania’ across the nation, which, however, has not received due attention in the international literature, and thus deserves critical examination and reflection to inform policy debates. To address this gap, this study investigates the state of smart cities in China, based on a case study of Shenzhen, China’s fastest-growing, experimental city. Shenzhen grew from a fishing village into an international metropolis in 40 years, and has now won a nickname of ‘China’s Silicon Valley’ or ‘China’s smartest city’. This study analyses the state of Chinese smart cities and the pursuit for a smart Shenzhen from the perspectives of the smart city as a concept, as an urban development paradigm, and as an urban regime, drawing upon the international smart city literature. It concludes that a technology-centric approach to smart cities in China, as illustrated by the Shenzhen case, have advanced innovation capacity and economic growth through capitalising on a ‘latecomer’s advantage’. However, this ‘latecomer’s advantage’ may translate into a ‘latecomer’s disadvantage’ for this approach’s lack of institutional adaptation, and for its insufficient attention to social and environmental problems covered under the shiny economic boom. This latecomer’s disadvantage is likely to impact the long-term sustainability of Chinese cities.
Highlights
The recent decades have witnessed the surge of a smart city movement, a globalised urban discourse and development paradigm, which had been initially facilitated by technological advancement, but has quickly progressed beyond a technological dimension to articulate with economic, social and environmental goals in contemporary urban governance and policy [1,2,3,4]
Shenzhen grew from a fishing village into an international metropolis in 40 years, and has won a nickname of ‘China’s Silicon Valley’ or ‘China’s smartest city’
Combining the diverging and converging literature points out a two-layer, in a broad sense, conceptualisation of the smart city: an internal layer of information technological advancement combined with the knowledge economy; and an external layer of articulating the smart city with various urban concepts and challenges, such as sustainability, climate change, and social inclusion
Summary
The recent decades have witnessed the surge of a smart city movement, a globalised urban discourse and development paradigm, which had been initially facilitated by technological advancement, but has quickly progressed beyond a technological dimension to articulate with economic, social and environmental goals in contemporary urban governance and policy [1,2,3,4]. The smart city movement, in the forms of growing numbers of smart city programs across the world, has attracted a burgeoning body of literature on its conceptualisation, policy approaches, desired outcomes, and mythification and demythification [4,5,6,7] These practical and intellectual efforts, coupled with the industry’s pursuit of market opportunities, the media’s reportage and debates, and the community’s general favour for a ‘smart’ vision for their cities, have created ‘the smart city’ a new buzzword. Despite these booming smart cities in China, they are not fully engaged in the international scholarship, and there is no critical literature on the state of their development to draw insights and to inform an understanding of their trajectory Set against these above backgrounds, this study is centred on answering this question: to what extent do the smart cities in China conform to or differ from their international counterparts?
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