Technology first, sustainability later: a systematic review on the literature on the policy development of China’s smart city strategy

Abstract

In China, like in other countries, smart cities have been proposed to make cities more efficient and, ideally, also more sustainable and low-carbon. Unlike other countries, China pursued a smart city strategy since 2008 with substantial funding and intermediate goals, resulting in high data and computational-intensive digital infrastructures in some cities. However, there is a lack of systematic understanding of how Chinese smart city policies and practices evolved. It is also unclear if and how smart cities achieve sustainability goals. Here, we fill these gaps by conducting a systematic literature review on the timeline of China’s smart city policies during the past three Five-Year Plans. The literature review, based on screening 7995 papers, and analyzing 364 relevant articles, shows that priority research topics are smart city systems and governance, including surveillance, with a more limited focus on policy. China’s net-zero carbon strategy is far less developed than its smart city strategy. The funding and development of large-scale data and AI technology is exemplified in Hangzhou’s ‘Urban Brain’. While sustainability goals are often associated with smart cities, we find few applications with demonstrated sustainability benefits. We suggest that mutual learning is possible by combining the net zero strategy and sustainable city strategy of cities like Copenhagen, Nairobi, Singapore and Toronto with the urban brain strategy of cities like Hangzhou.