Evaluation of Chinese Smart City Implementations: A Case Study of ‘Cloud Seeds Plans’ in Shenzhen

In the past decade, smart city has been regarded as being able to promote urban governance and tackle socio-economic issues. Many scholars have argued the definitions, benchmarks and indicators of such topic from various perspectives and dimensions. However, their conceptual approaches pay over attention on the Anglophone world and lack the capability of explaining Chinese scenario. Therefore, after reviewing the critical bibliography, this paper proposes a new benchmark of Chinese smart city according to the specific situations in China and evaluate this framework based on a smart city project, ‘Cloud seeds plans’ in Shenzhen. The result indicates that the project performs relatively well in creativity and social innovations, but need to be enhanced in open governances. Moreover, the project shows great potentiality in both smart governance as well as smart specialization strategies during the upsurge holdings era of electricity devices in the future. In conclusion, such localization attempts of smart city on one hand is conducive to building up a better sustainable form of urban development, on the other hand, may lead to a deeper discussion on the smart city implementations in third world countries.