Evaluation On The Performance Of Smart Cities In China: A Comparative Research

The unsustainable situation of urban development and rapid development of modern information technologies impulsed the emergence of smart city. Since this concept proposed by IBM in 2009, smart city has been gaining increasing attention among academia and practitioners as a new technology-based solution to meet the city disease challenges. A great deal of cities declaimed to be ‘smart', the total number of smart pilot cities issued by Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development(MOHURD) has arrived 290. Whilst the initiatives of smart city are booming, there exposed many problems in the process of development of smart cities, such as information island among different departments and industries, paid high attention on construction of hardware facilities but little attention on the institutional arrangement, similar construction style causing cities lack of identities and characteristics. Evaluation on the smart city development level of these pilot cities, and the further comparative analysis, would help cities to identify the strengths and weaknesses, to find out the ways and areas to further improve smart city development, and to review the effectiveness and efficiency of policies and measures issued by city's government. Thus, to carry out the evaluation and comparative analysis of these polite cities is of great value for smart city development.Literature review is conducted to build a holistic and systematic understanding of the concept and principles of smart city, and is also used to analyze the existing smart city assessment indicator systems. Based on the literature review, three key elements of construction, operation and development of a smart city are identified, including basic resources, city's application systems and core objective of smart city. Further an indicator system including 22 specific indicators is established, containing five dimensions, namely smart infrastructure, smart government, smart economy, smart people, and smart environment. And an evaluation model based on Entropy weighting method and technique for order preference by similarty to ideal solution(TOPSIS) method is established. Using the indicator system and model, 44 cities are final selected as the samples of empirical research, and a comparative analysis of the difference between different cities and different regions is conducted based on the results of evaluation. Further, based on the evaluation score of each dimension, a cluster analysis is conducted. 44 cities are divided into 5categories, and the characteristic analysis helps to identify the focal points of each categories for better improving smart performance of cities. The studying results inluding:(1)The total level of smart city development of these 44 cities is at a relatively lower level, and the scores present a “Rugby” distribution, meaning few cities performed well or worse and most of them are at a middle and lower level. There are large differences between different cities. Generally speaking, the coastal cities are performed better than inland cities. There is a relatively strong consistency among the rank of smart infrastructure, smart government, smart economy and smart people, but is of great difference with the rank of smart environment.(2)The results of the studying on the reason of these differences shows it is mainly associated with the economic strength of cities, whether or not there is detailed smart city development plannings and whether it is coordinate among the five dimensions of the indicator systems.Finally, according to these analysis, three proposals are put forward : firstly, to solve the capital deficiency of smart city development through promoting development pattern of Public-Private-Partnership(PPP); secondly, to establish a sound system of smart city by top-to-bottom designing; last, to offset the weakness of environmental performance by promoting smart transformation of environmental management.