Intelligent services supporting on-going and future urban developments in china

Since IBM brought the concept of "Smarter planet" in China in 2008, smart cities construction has become a new trend of urban development. By 2013, there have been 193 approved pilot projects of smart cities in China. Smart city is viewed as key strategy to promoting industrialization, informatization and urbanization. The rapid development of smart cities in China is largely attributed to the cooperation between IT companies and the government. This chapter will describe how smart cities have been developed in China. It will pay particularly attention to the roles and relationships of various actors (including the government, market and society) in the development of smart city. It is a remarkable issue that major cities in China are able to transform from information and digital technology city into a "Smart City"; also it is an inevitable requirement for major cities to adapt itself to more complicated management. This chapter expounds the features of Smart Cities based on the development in many cities and demonstrates the technological application development paths to be the smarter cities based on unity and diversity characteristic for cities all over China. This chapter will finally summarize Chinese experiences on the development of smart cities and give visions on future developments.