China’s “Smart” Urban Future: Utopia or Dystopia?

As part of the “Constructing Urban Futures in Asia” project, my new research explores how digital and “smart” technologies are reshaping urban spaces and social dynamics in the city of Hangzhou, an eastern Chinese metropolis at the forefront of “smart city building” in China.

Globally, China has emerged as a leader in “smart city” development, leveraging embedded sensors, cameras, monitoring technologies, big data processing, and AI analysis to govern urban spaces and people. In this project, I am interested in understanding how these technologies impact the conventional approaches of urban planners and architects. I am investigating how they incorporate digital technologies into their professional toolkits, integrate “smart city” devices into their visions of creating better urban futures, and more broadly, how these technologies are transforming the field of urban planning.

The concept of the “smart city” has become prevalent in discussions about the future of urban environments. With the looming challenges of urbanization, new technologies are often portrayed as impartial, all-encompassing solutions promising cleaner, safer, more efficient, and sustainable cities. This narrative has been embraced by political, corporate and popular discourse, envisioning future cities as both beneficiaries and laboratories for technological innovation. Meanwhile, urban scholars and social scientists tend to critique the “smart city” as a self-congratulatory label that draws on an ideology of solutionism. They argue that rather than addressing issues, it tends to mystify problems and divert attention from the need to fundamentally re-evaluate our political and economic systems and, ultimately, our way of life. More pessimistically, some regard the “smart city” label as a mere euphemism, a convenient disguise for the exercise of political and corporate power. It is, indeed, not just since China’s draconian Covid-19 lockdowns that scholars and a concerned public see in the use of digital technology the disconcerting attempt to fashion complete social control, yet packaged in a political-corporate story of “improvement”.

Yet, the primary focus of my research is not to assess the outcomes of “smart city” development in relation to its promises, or to determine whether digital technologies make cities “better” or “worse”. Instead, I begin with an empirical examination of “technology in action.” I aim to understand how digital technologies, both in their conceptual and applied forms, impact daily lives. To do this, I intend to follow professionals tasked with implementing concrete urban projects, such as designing public parks, shopping centres, or “smart communities”. I will observe how these professionals, in their daily routines, think about, discuss, conceptualize, and ultimately integrate so-called “smart technologies” into their projects. I explore the debates surrounding this process, the reconciliation of digital technologies as both “security devices” (extensions of state or corporate power) and “problem-solvers” (designed for the common good), the establishment and negotiation of the definitions of “smart technologies”, and the social, economic, and political issues deemed significant or overlooked in the application of such technologies.