The country’s 14th Five-Year Plan clearly states: “Strengthen the construction of a digital society and digital government, and enhance the digital and intelligent levels of urban services and social governance.” Against this backdrop, smart cities driven by digital technology have become an important link connecting digital governments and intelligent societies. Smart cities have developed in China for over a decade and have become a national strategic choice for building a digital China and developing the digital economy. From the launch of large-scale pilot projects in 2012, to the elevation of smart cities to a national strategy in 2014, and then to the first proposal of building “new-type smart cities” in the “13th Five-Year Plan” in 2016, all these indicate that the construction of smart cities has entered a new stage of pursuing high-quality development. Since the 14th Five-Year Plan, the construction of new smart cities has been in full swing. From the discussions on how to make the “city brain” smarter at the 2020 National Two Sessions, to the heated discussions on the construction of new smart cities at the 2021 National Two Sessions, and then to the explicit proposal in the 2022 Government Work Report to “build digital information infrastructure, promote the large-scale application of 5G, facilitate the digital transformation of industries, and develop smart cities and digital villages”, The new type of smart city has become a social consensus as the advanced stage of urban digital construction.
Recently, the overall planning document for Digital China was released. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and The State Council issued the “Overall Layout Plan for Digital China Construction” and sent out a notice, requiring all regions and departments to earnestly implement it in light of their actual conditions. As a significant document that will influence China’s future development, this has also been evaluated by the industry as the “arrival of the digital leadership era”. The new type of smart city is a Chinese expression of the concept of smart city proposed under the background of the continuous infiltration of digital technology, in response to the actual needs of the economy and society, with the core of serving the people wholeheartedly, fully embodying the urban development concept with Chinese characteristics.
Smart cities represent the high-end form of modern urban development. As the world’s most dynamic testing ground for digital innovation, the new type of smart city is a major strategic choice made by the country based on the goals of informatization, industrialization and urbanization. It is also an important carrier for developing a digital China, the digital economy and promoting the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity. Since 2020, events such as the COVID-19 pandemic have posed numerous practical challenges to modern urban management in China. Vigorously developing new smart cities has become an inevitable strategic choice. How to enhance the resilience of cities for rapid recovery and sustainable development during extraordinary times is a new focus in the construction of new smart cities. It can be seen that it is extremely urgent to give full play to the enabling role of digital technology, grasp the transformation laws of lifestyle and governance methods at the urban spatial scale, and explore solutions to the current development predicament of smart cities.
