ABSTRACT
Although there is no shortage of international commentary on China’s more ambitious urban development projects and policies, researchers have paid relatively little attention to the growing importance of smart city ideas within these. The current chapter therefore aims to add to our collective understanding of ‘smart urbanism’ in the Chinese context. However, rather than taking its cues from global cities in the international limelight (for example, Shanghai) or from new digital technologies in exemplar development projects (for example, Tianjin Eco-City), the chapter responds to the call by Shelton and colleagues (2015) to investigate how the ‘actually existing smart city’ is rolling out in more ‘ordinary’ settings (Amin and Graham 1997, Robinson 2006). Specifically, the case of Wuhan is used to illustrate the ways that the smart city concept has ‘landed’ in typical Chinese urban space, since the city is neither a high-profile coastal metropolis nor a remote backwater. The case of Wuhan, and its national context, is potentially of empirical interest to readers more familiar with smart city development elsewhere; but it also has particular importance as one of several cities in which significant hope and resources are currently being invested as a model for future urban development in China. In this chapter, we address two research questions: What is distinctive about the Chinese smart city, as exemplified by Wuhan? And what does that tell us about smart city development elsewhere?
