Is smart city a slogan? Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Many ideas of urban experiments have been used in sloganeering to stimulate short-term economic growth in China. A question arises: Is the smart city a slogan? This study estimated the relationship between smart city pilot projects and regional economic growth by using the difference-in-differences (DID) model and explored smart cities’ myths through 19 unstructured interviews. The following conclusions were drawn. First, smart city pilot projects positively affected regional economic growth, but with time-lag effects. Second, market and infrastructure effects co-shaped regional economic growth. Third, benefiting from a newly created market, a few cities with foundations for smart industries have developed rapidly. Over time, an increasing number of smart cities would benefit from the projects by the constructed smart infrastructure. Although scholars have long criticized previous urban experiments in China as a slogan only for land revenue generation, this study suggests that smart cities could be a new model for regional economic development through market and infrastructure effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart urbanization
• economic development
• urban marketing
• innovative change
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Jinn-yuh Hsu for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The authors also would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors (Calvin King Lam Chung and Mingshu Wang) for their constructive comments.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The ailments of the cities are also known as “urban diseases” or “big city diseases” in China.

2 Excessive attention of local governments (and real estate developers) to the aid of land finance can lead to some challenging works (e.g., technological innovation, smart industry development, new urban environment creation) being skipped when smart cities are developed.

3 As the China Urban Statistical Yearbook no longer provides data on investment in fixed assets since 2017, we showed regression results including investment in fixed assets using the data from 2007 to 2016.

4 New infrastructure refers to a range of technology-oriented infrastructure, such as 5G infrastructure, UHV, inter-city high-speed railway and inter-city rail transit, new energy vehicle charging piles, big data centers, artificial intelligence, and industrial Internet.