Enhancing Transformative Capacity: Lesson Learned from Chinese Smart Cities
Despite the strong top-down approach of smart city planning, Chinese Smart City successfully nurture the innovative and collaborative environment in their governance system by encouraging local municipality to adapt national strategic plan based on the local context. Smart Cities in China take full advantage of the top-down process as it secures the legal status of planning and its authority, and the government’s constant monitoring process that enhances the implementation effectiveness. Meyer et al. (2021) notes that in the implementation of urban planning by exploring technology that reflects the local characteristics is the best way to optimise smart city development.
On the other hand, based on Wolfram’s Transformative Capacity Concept, there are several lesson points that Chinese Smart City do to ensure their success. Firstly, in the Agency and Interaction Forms, cities in China have diverse urban actors involved in the different planning and implementation stages yet they have strong leadership and ownership of the Smart City Projects. This may be due to the higher public awareness and social learning systems are a key measure to increase transformative capacity, that increase the commitment towards implementation by actors/community involved. In the Core Development Process, a great transformative capacity point is the integration and reinforcement of different sorts of plans. Smart Cities also are given the opportunity for experimentation and testing. This maintains flexibility for lower-level actors to play their initiatives and encourage high initiative and proactive attitude of the local government. Thus, the local government can be more adaptable to the constant change in technologies requires timely adjustment and adaptation for planning and implementation in smart city development. Lastly, in the Relational Dimensions, in the case of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Wuhan, Chongqing and Tianji, the quality of the plan is improving through more international cooperation and collaboration. This facilitates the exchange of know-how and advance the smart city development.
Reference:
Meyer, S et al. (2021). Enhancing Capacity Building for Urban Transformation as a Means to Close the Planning–Implementation Gap in Europe and China. In Towards Socially Integrative Cities (Vol. 9). MDPI, Basel.
Wolfram, M. (2016). Conceptualizing urban transformative capacity: A framework for research and policy. Cities, 51, 121-130.
