ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the collective understanding of 'smart urbanism' in the Chinese context. Specifically, the case of Wuhan is used to illustrate the ways that the smart city concept has 'landed' in typical Chinese urban space, since the city is neither a high-profile coastal metropolis nor a remote backwater. After providing brief contextual information about Wuhan and sketching out its current smart city activities, the chapter considers three interrelated dimensions of their recent emergence. First, from a 'vertical' perspective, they are enabled by national policies which adapt and frame the loose global discourse of the smart city to reflect particular Chinese agendas. Second, from a more 'horizontal', municipality-centric perspective, the chapter explores the additional significance and more dispersed agency associated with a Chinese mode of 'urban entrepreneurialism'. Finally, it suggests that the more obvious significance of the smart for daily life is embedded within a much broader embrace of everyday digital technology, which extends beyond the 'smart' label itself.
