China’s Smartness Mandate
As part of the research project “Constructing Urban Futures in Asia,” this project examines how digital and so called “smart” technologies are reshaping urban planning, governance and everyday life in contemporary China. Focusing on Hangzhou, an eastern Chinese metropolis at the forefront of China’s smart city agenda, the research explores how digitalisation is transforming not only urban infrastructures but also professional practices and ideas of what constitutes a “good city.”
China has emerged as a global leader in smart city development, deploying sensors, cameras, platforms, big data processing and AI driven analytics to manage urban spaces and populations. These technologies are widely promoted as neutral and efficient solutions to the challenges of rapid urbanisation, promising cleaner, safer, more sustainable and more liveable cities. This optimistic narrative has been embraced across political, corporate and popular discourse, positioning cities simultaneously as beneficiaries and laboratories of technological innovation. At the same time, critical urban scholarship has raised concerns that the “smart city” functions as a depoliticising label, one that mystifies social problems, promotes technological solutionism and obscures underlying political and economic choices. In more pessimistic readings, smart urbanism is seen as a euphemism for intensified surveillance and control.
Rather than evaluating whether smart cities succeed or fail on their own terms, this project adopts an ethnographic approach to “technology in action.” It investigates how smart technologies are imagined, negotiated and implemented in everyday professional practice. Based on twelve months of fieldwork among urban planners, architects, technology developers and community organisers in Hangzhou, the research follows concrete urban projects such as public parks, shopping centres and experimental “future communities.” Through close observation of meetings, design processes, pilot projects and on the ground implementation, it examines how digital tools enter professional repertoires and how “smartness” is translated from abstract policy ambition into material form.
Conceptually, the project treats the smart city not as a coherent technological model but as a powerful yet indeterminate mandate, one that frames digitalisation as inevitable, desirable and politically necessary. At the policy level, smart urbanism emerges as a central component of China’s techno developmental strategy, aligning urban governance with platforms, data infrastructures and artificial intelligence. Flagship initiatives such as Hangzhou’s City Brain exemplify this platform urbanism, combining promises of efficiency and safety with expanded capacities for monitoring and control. Yet my ethnography shows that implementation remains uneven and fragmented, often resulting in symbolic showcases and pilot projects rather than fully integrated systems.
Different professional groups engage with the smartness mandate in divergent ways. Technology firms approach smart urbanism as an entrepreneurial opportunity, packaging platforms, sensors and drones as marketable gimmicks that blur governance and spectacle. Conventional planners, by contrast, often experience smartification as an external obligation that reshapes funding criteria, evaluation metrics and professional rhetoric while leaving core design practices largely intact. At the community level, smart city discourse is frequently translated into low tech social practices. Pilot “future community” projects illustrate how digital rhetoric legitimises investment even as everyday outcomes are low-tech.
Across these settings, the smart city emerges less as a technological rupture than as a reconfiguration of long-standing modes of high-modernist urban planning and governance. Overall, the project shows that smartification in China operates as a flexible but effective signifier, legitimising intervention, reshaping professional imaginaries and masking political choices.