"From the time the idea of smart cities entered China around 2010, to the time when more than 26 ministries, commissions and bureaus have been pushing forward the smart city (construction), there are now several hundred cities nationwide that are doing this work on smart cities." At the 2016 GMIC Global Mobile Internet Conference, Xu Zhenqiang, deputy director of the Digital City Engineering Research Center of the China Urban Science Research Association, briefly summarized the course of smart city development in China.
Beginning with the announcement of the first 90 smart city pilots in January 2013, China has released three batches of nearly 300 smart city pilots, introduced corresponding plans, and planned an investment scale of more than 1 trillion yuan. From the actual results in many areas, smart cities have achieved extensive results in areas such as urban transportation, healthcare, and government administration.
The hot concepts and extensive pilots reflect the enthusiasm of city managers for smart city construction, but traffic congestion, air pollution, urban flooding and other "urban diseases" still plague many cities. This allows some industry experts to have a new thinking about the smart city pilot construction work that has been widely carried out: after nearly 300 cities to carry out the pilot, what problems are still faced by the smart city construction? What are the experiences of the past three years of piloting?
So far, there is no uniform definition
What is a smart city? As a new concept arising from the era of information technology change, there is no uniform definition of a smart city.
The National New Urbanization Plan (2014~2020) issued by the Central Committee and the State Council in 2014 clearly proposes to promote the construction of smart cities, indicating six construction directions: broadband information network, informatization of planning and management, intelligent infrastructure, convenient public **** services, modernization of industrial development, and refinement of social governance.
After being piloted and promoted in many cities, the concept of smart city has also been widely applied in different industries and fields. Zou Liang, vice president of Ant Gold Service's payment business group, said at the GMIC Global Mobile Internet Conference that mobile payment allows everyone to connect to all the smart facilities through the smart terminals in their hands, which can make every user truly perceive the smart city. "Only when citizens can all perceive it, is the arrival of the real smart city."
In the same venue, Baidu Maps Open Platform General Manager Li Zhitang explained the concept of smart city from the perspective of transportation and travel. In his view, the emergence of various types of maps and travel software, not only to help users find timely geographic information, but also to know the real-time accurate urban traffic situation, to provide users with the Internet's intelligent transportation service program.
"Smart city is an open and complex system, which involves various subsystems such as politics, economy and finance." According to Yuan Xin, president of Beijing Tsinghua Tongheng Planning and Design Institute, smart cities have different meanings in different industries and fields, and their purpose is to make cities run more efficiently and improve urban quality.
Xue Xiangxiang is the chairman of Donghua Software Co, Ltd, which carries out software services for smart cities in several cities. According to his observation, among the many smart city pilots, "no city just falls on the concept, all of them are more or less on the ground."
He believes that each city's smart city construction is characterized differently. The partners are not the same, and the choice of entry point is also different. "Some choose smart healthcare, some choose smart public security, and some start with a city card."
Yuan Xin also said that the key issue of smart city construction is how to land at the application level, and different regions have different focuses. "When we do smart cities, we have always advocated finding a combination between the government's top-down approach and the bottom-up approach of enterprises and society."
According to incomplete statistics from the 2014 Annual Work Summary Report of National Smart City Pilots released by the China Urban Science Research Society, by the end of 2014, 65 percent of the pilot cities had completed the top-level design of their smart cities, and about 11 percent of them were carrying out the work. Among them, the top-level design work in Jiangsu, Sichuan, Hubei, Anhui, Jilin and Beijing provinces and cities has been carried out better overall.
In 2013, Beijing's Chaoyang District was included in the first pilot list of smart cities. According to Wang Zhen, director of the informatization office in Chaoyang District, after the top-level design work of the smart city was basically completed, the district focused on developing all kinds of data **** enjoyment in the city, "putting big data in the first place."
Why so much emphasis on urban management of big data? Wang Zhen said that the main problem in the construction of the smart city is to "let the data speak", through the data ****sharing to make the link between the departments, so that enterprises **** with the participation of the city's construction of big data and cloud computing work.
True wisdom and false wisdom of the dispute
In the past three years, most of the nearly 300 pilot cities have smart city landing, but Zou Liang still feel "not enough".
As a mobile Internet practitioner, he likes to look at the effect of building smart cities around the world from the user's perspective. "In fact, people do not have a strong perception of the smart city or life, we feel the progress of smart health care, smart transportation, but not imagined so highly intelligent."
Large-scale piloting and top-level design work is being gradually promoted, but many people do not feel so profoundly about smart cities, which triggered a round of debate on "whether smart cities are really smart or fake smart".
At this year's annual meeting of the Boao Forum for Asia, Qiu Baoxing, former vice minister of the Ministry of Housing and Construction, pointed out that over the past period of time, a lot of places have taken the wrong path, the development of a "fake smart city".
"Cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, this is a smart city?" Qiu Baoxing believes that because the smart city is "something new", we have not experienced what is pseudo-wisdom, what is false wisdom, what is an empty concept, so it is easy to be misled.
From the practice of the pilot cities in recent years, Qiu Baoxing believes that some "smart city" can not solve any kind of urban disease, some of them are IT companies "kidnapped", become a channel for enterprises to promote their products; some of them are government departments. "Kidnapped", the formation of information islands between departments do not communicate with each other; there are a lot of "fooling around", but also some places "smart city" from the planning is wrong.
So, what kind of smart city is scientific and feasible? Qiu Baoxing believes that there are now three concepts of smart city is better: the first is to solve traffic congestion, water pollution and other urban diseases; the second is to use information technology to solve the original infrastructure investment to solve the problem of those who can not solve the problem of energy saving and emission reduction services; the third is to facilitate the people to supervise the government, "do a poor job, do a good job at a glance, it is all the things faithfully recorded! things are faithfully recorded."
Xu Zhenqiang said, the first few years for the definition and understanding of the smart city did not form a more comprehensive knowledge, to promote the construction of the smart city of the fast pace, and even a bit of movement, resulting in a lot of projects, although the implementation of the project, but there are still some problems in the final operation.
In his view, it is not surprising that the average person's perception of the smart city is not obvious. Because our country in promoting the construction of smart cities, due to the specificity of the institutional mechanism, often do is the overall planning, but Europe and the United States developed countries of the smart city construction is generally in accordance with the "small and fine" idea, "first from the small to do up.
Limited response to public demands
Because it is not a "small but fine" construction ideas, but overall planning, extensive pilot, many areas of the smart city construction is often prone to relatively similar problems.
The National Smart City Pilot 2014 Annual Work Summary Report points out that China's smart city pilot work is still facing problems such as insufficient innovation, funding difficulties, evaluation system and lack of standards, and some of the pilot cities have a high degree of awareness of the smart city is insufficient, but also stay in the simple city information construction level.
In Yuan Xin's research, from the perspective of improving the efficiency of urban operation, the smart city is actually a test of cross-sectoral synergy. Because of the wide range of pilots, the number of comprehensive roll-out, many times need to be led by government departments.
The aforementioned Report also pointed out that there are still a lot of problems in the unified construction and coordination **** enjoyment of smart cities. Part of the pilot construction projects lack of top-level design and overall coordination, synergistic docking difficulties, duplication of construction and the phenomenon of information islands still exist. The "compartmentalization" between departments has resulted in the serious phenomenon of "information silos", especially some vertical departmental information systems are limited to internal departmental use, the lack of inter-departmental data **** enjoyment and application.
Because of the lack of synergy and other reasons, many regions are promoting the smart city and did not do a good job of solving traffic congestion and other "urban diseases". Xu Zhenqiang said that the current smart city work often pay attention to hardware investment, but not enough attention to the participation and feelings of the public, the response to the demands of urban development is relatively limited. Some taxi software, for example, could have solved some of the public's travel problems based on big data on transportation, but if it is not guided in a positive direction, resulting in far more drivers registered on line than are actually needed, it could exacerbate congestion.
He also argued that smart city construction projects in some countries tend to be mostly enterprise-led, while domestic smart cities are generally led by the government, making it even more important to consider the relationship between the government and social or industry units. And in the experience of the previous few years, the smart city construction in many places is basically government-led, with a very single investment and insufficient consideration of economic returns.
He suggests that the most important thing for smart city construction to continue in the future is to "return to the integration of industry and city", especially focusing on enhancing the modern service industry that is integrated with the local leading industries, and avoiding investment in a large number of engineering projects.
Many technology-based companies are also willing to participate. Zou Liang believes that, over the past decade, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and other Internet companies to obtain information technology capabilities should be "socialized to contribute to the connection of social resources, so as to produce a real chemical reaction. Take the mobile payment field as an example, the current mobile payment enterprises can actually contribute their own real-name management of users, payment security, fraud prevention, credit management capabilities, and the government's needs relative to each other. In this way, the construction cost of the government's mobile payment system in the smart city will be greatly reduced, through the connection can be opened, and even call.