Smart City Development Goal: Perfecting People's Livelihood Service and Realizing Humanistic Care

HC Security Network News Now many smart city construction plan just "high-rise buildings, cross roads and large squares," the material type of urbanization construction mode information technology upgrades. In the economic changes, the development of the city is uncertain. On the one hand, some cities that once had a glorious history and an important political and economic status are now "stunned by the city."

Smart City Development Goal: Perfecting People's Livelihood Service and Realizing Humanistic Care

At the same time, other cities are relying on the new economic engine to enter the fast lane of development. What factors have led to the differentiation of urban development trajectories? What are the kinetic energy that drives the rise of the city? What development goals should be formulated for future urban development? The blueprint for urban agglomeration construction and urban planning is being rolled out. Sike invites think tank experts to interpret the new pattern, new model and new ideas of urban construction in the new era.

In November 2008, IBM proposed the "Smart Earth" concept at the Foreign Relations Council in New York. Then the concept of “smart city” generated based on this concept has swept the world and has become a recognized direction for urban development. In the process of rapid urbanization in China, the construction of smart cities has also been fully rolled out. By the end of 2015, 386 cities in China had built smart cities. The proportion of prefecture-level cities has reached 74%, and county-level cities have also reached 32%. Just entering the 21st century, Nobel Prize-winning economist Stiglitz once predicted that two major events affecting humanity in this century, one is China's urbanization, and the other is the new technological revolution led by the United States. Nowadays, the construction of smart cities in China is precisely the integration of the two, which is the trend of the times.

But in fact, China's smart city construction has experienced a tortuous process of exploration. Qiu Baoxing, former deputy director of the Ministry of Housing and Construction, once said: “The 'smart city' is the marketing concept proposed by IBM... Let our country go a big detour. Any new technology application or promotion of new concepts must be able to Solving the problem, but we have been misled by the concept of 'smart city' for quite some time."

For a long period of time, smart cities have been confined to the layout and construction of basic networks such as Internet of Things, cloud computing, and mobile Internet, both in terms of ideas and practices. In fact, this is a misunderstanding of smart cities: thinking that by investing more money and having a better information infrastructure, cities can achieve intelligent development. In reality, the infrastructure in some places has advanced ahead of schedule, but the people's livelihood issues of the people still have to be resolved. Nowadays, the development model of many cities is not to build a real smart city, but to upgrade the material-building urbanization model of “high-rise buildings, cross-roads, and big squares”. The core of the focus is still things rather than citizens. .

For a long time, our urban planning has placed too much emphasis on technical logic thinking, and instrumental rationality has greatly overvalued value rationality. This development idea has allowed us to build a lot of new urban areas, but it has not effectively solved urban problems in many areas. Too much reliance on technology has led to the deviation of the public attributes of urban construction and the vagueness of value judgment. Anton Nicholson, author of "Smart City", also stated in the book: "Only adopting any technology itself, no matter how good, can't solve the urban problem."

In fact, the West has also followed a similar detour. In the 1960s, quantitative analysis of cybernetics and system dynamics was popular in the urban planning field, but this momentum did not combine well with the actual needs of the citizens and quickly declined. In 1973, Douglas Li published the "Requiem of a Large-Scale Urban Model", and the subsequent MIT urban system experiment closed, marking the disappearance of the city's development trend. Scholars who have followed the urban development quantitative and informational exploration have emphasized that cities need more responsible modeling, emphasizing people-oriented, and making technology better serve people.

Many people regard the history of urban development as the history of technological progress, the ever-expanding history of urban areas, and the history of rural populations moving to cities. In fact, in the final analysis, urban history should be a history of increasing people's freedom and happiness. We gather in the city for a better life, to meet the diverse needs of low-level basic food and clothing to high-level free will. From this perspective, the smart city is essentially the urban development transformation realized by means of technology in the information age: the urban humanized development model supported by information and communication technology, to continuously realize the high-level transition of people's needs.

The first page of the popular "Smart City" book cites the famous phrase "City is the Man" in Shakespeare's drama "Colianonas". The first sentence of London's smart city planning, Smart London 2020, is that “London citizens are the core”. The core of China's new urbanization is also through the urbanization of people, to achieve the transformation of urbanization from quantitative expansion to qualitative improvement. Some public policies are accustomed to placing smart cities in separate technical support chapters and confining them to the narrow concept of urban planning informatization, which actually narrows the connotation of smart cities and weakens the possible possibility of “digital dividends”. Great potential to come. Only people-oriented, smart cities can be integrated into all aspects of urban construction, in order to better realize the urban development path of human nature. In the new era, urbanization will focus more on people than on things. The entire population of the city is the main body of construction and service of smart cities. Smart cities will lead the city's intelligent development, and its most important goal is to continuously improve the level of humanity.

Therefore, the path of smart city development is actually a disorder of the values ​​of technological imperialism. Our city is relying on technology to pursue higher, faster and bigger, or use technology to improve people's livelihood services and better realize humanistic care? Obviously, the real smart city development goal is the latter. The construction of a smart city is closely related to the well-being of people. Every worker involved in the construction of a smart city needs to take people as the core, proceed from the needs of people, and consider the role and value of smart city construction from a microscopic individual perspective.

The humanized development of the city requires the construction of smart cities to proceed from practical problems, and the goal orientation is problem-oriented. Smart cities need to solve specific urban problems faced by citizens, rather than presuppose a grand blueprint for the city. Through the intelligent guidance of public services (smart education, smart medical care, etc.), smart cities will better serve the needs of citizens.

A good smart city will be a city for all citizens, which also requires the participation of more stakeholders. Through public-private partnership and multi-participation, the combination of top-down and bottom-up urban development models is achieved, and the traditional government-led single construction model is changed. At the same time, the construction of smart cities based on reality will be more diversified and diversified, without being tied to uniform standards. The development of many cities in China is extremely uneven, and the basic conditions of developed and underdeveloped regions are quite different. This requires a flexible and diverse path of smart city development based on local conditions, rather than a one-size-fits-all standardization.

People-oriented smart city construction will be an indispensable component and an important supporting force for new urbanization, and will vigorously promote the transformation of urban planning, construction and management models. All along, we are all exploring: What is a good city like? A smart city may not bring a ready-made answer, but it can improve the well-being of urban residents through humanized top-level design and people-oriented investment construction and operation. In this process, technology is no longer a cold purpose, but a flexible, temperature-based means to achieve the city's care for people. If Howard's idyllic city and the glorious city of Le Corbusier dominate the global urbanization of the last century, then the smart city of people-oriented and humanized development will now bring us closer to the true ideals of the past: the city makes life more beautiful.

Editor in charge: Li Jin