14 JAN 2025 (TUE) 11:05-11:25

Emergent Geography of Smart Urbanism in China: Technology, Local Embeddedness, and Diverse Trajectories  

Miss CHEUNG Ying Jia

( Supervisor: Prof G.C.S. Lin )

Abstract:

The recent proliferation of smart city development across cities worldwide has garnered significant international scholarly attention. Current literature presents dominant narratives of smart urbanism as anchored in a technocentric premise that digital technology is ubiquitous and placeless, and that the growth of smart cities is decontextualized and advantageous to solving urban challenges. This perspective often overlooks the spatial variations and place-based dynamics that shape the diverse manifestation and outcomes of smart urbanism in different urban contexts, treating these spatial considerations as residual or natural conditions to be taken for granted. Against this backdrop, this proposed research targets to illustrate how smart urbanism remains contingent upon places with intricate interactions between technologies, geographies, and local contexts that contribute to the diverse trajectories of smart cities. China, as a world-leading smart city builder and a rapidly urbanizing nation characterized by significantly varied economic growth, urbanizing rate, governance structure, and demography across its vast territory, serves as a natural laboratory for this research. The research objectives are to identify the spatial variations in patterns and evolutionary trajectories of smart urbanism across Chinese cities, offer explanations, and evaluate their consequences. The proposed research inquiry unfolds across three scales: national, regional, and local level. At the national scale, tracing back to 2014, this proposed research utilizes panel data to measure and map the spatial variations and growth trajectories of urban smartness across 298 Chinese cities at the prefecture level and above. It then employs multivariate regression models to explain these patterns and the potential relationships between urban smartness and cities’ regional development contexts. Using geographically weighted regression, it evaluates the different impacts of smart urbanism on Chinese cities. At the regional scale, the research focus turns to the Greater Bay Area to reveal the diverse strategies and outcomes of smart city development among its cities through policy and documentary reviews, surveys, and interviews with local stakeholders. At the local scale, this proposed research focuses on the Hong Kong context to unpack the cities’ local approach to smart urbanism, the contributing factors, and the varied responses of residents in different districts through in-depth documentary reviews, resident surveys, and interviews. The research findings will contribute to the understanding of spatial heterogeneities and complexities in our digital world, offering an alternative perspective on how geographies and places remain significant within the context of smart urbanism, which often appears to be a placeless phenomenon.