Planning the Smart City in China

This paper offers a brief review of basic literature on smart cities to outline research issues in this field that require further attention from a governance perspective. It then maps the current urban planning landscape in China, a country which puts increasing emphasis on smart cities as a mechanism to promote sustainable development, in order to elicit key policy aspects that need to be considered in empirical analysis when "planning the Chinese smart city". The paper concludes by introducing a case of local innovation in the area of digital economy, the so-called Dream Town, undertaken in the city of Hangzhou as an illustrative example of urban China's current efforts on planning for smart city development.