On April 2, the National Data Administration issued the Guiding Opinions on Deepening the Development of Smart Cities and Promoting the Digital Transformation of Cities (Draft for Comments) (hereinafter referred to as the Guiding Opinions). The "city-wide digital transformation" proposed in the title has become the guiding ideology of the whole text and the biggest highlight of the guidance.
It has been ten years since the National Development and Reform Commission and other eight ministries and commissions issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Healthy Development of Smart Cities". Looking back at the construction of smart cities in mainland China, after several ups and downs, the basic model of digital government has been formed, including one network unified management, one network for all offices, and one network for coordination, which has also greatly promoted the implementation of the concept of data openness and public participation. However, in terms of marketization and operability, it has been unsatisfactory. If the city ≠ government does not fully understand the concept of "city" and only understands it as a government that pays directly, it is impossible to truly realize "smart city". This article analyzes the improvement of several key cognitions of smart cities in the Guiding Opinions.
1. Integrated carrier
In the 2014 "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Healthy Development of Smart Cities", the first is to scientifically formulate the top-level design of smart city construction. However, the top-level design we see is often a technical solution for digital government, what is the "top layer"? In fact, it is essentially to understand the city from what level. According to the Guiding Opinions, "as a unit of national economic development, social governance and public services, cities are a comprehensive carrier for promoting the construction of digital China". From this point of view, the city is the carrier of the entire human civilization, and it is also the carrier of all new quality productive forces.
"Efforts should be made to consolidate the foundation for the digital transformation of the whole city, and strive to promote the digital transformation of the city's economic, political, cultural, social and ecological civilization, and strive to build a sustainable development ecology of digital transformation." "Develop emerging digital industries according to local conditions, and strengthen the integrated application of key digital technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain, advanced computing, future networks, satellite remote sensing, and 3D modeling in urban scenarios......"
These expressions have repeatedly emphasized that smart cities should be understood as a new form of the entire socio-economic system. This is the best concept to explain the new form of civilization that digital technology has emerged from the application of physical space and social space as a whole.
Based on a similar understanding, Musk is highly integrating technical capabilities such as artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, super factories, humanoid robots, renewable energy, energy storage, aerospace, and space-based Internet. James Webb, former director of NASA, once proposed that "if the current technology can solve the complex survival problems encountered by astronauts in the harsh space environment, such as drinking water, air, and sewage treatment, these engineering innovations will have reference significance and practical value for urban construction." ”
2. Complex systems
"Comprehensively reshape the technical architecture of smart cities, systematically change the urban management process, and promote the deep integration of industry and city", "comprehensively improve the integrity, systematization and coordination of the city's digital transformation".
The city is an open and complex giant system, each subsystem not only has its own regular characteristics, but also has extensive and profound interactions with other subsystems, and exhibits the characteristics of nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, adaptation, and feedback loop of the complex system. THE REDUCTIONIST APPROACH CREATED BY IBM AND CISCO, WHICH BREAKS DOWN SMART CITIES INTO SEVERAL SUBSYSTEMS, HAS ITS VALUE, BUT IT IS NOT ENOUGH. This is why systematic, holistic and synergistic nature is repeatedly mentioned in the guidance.
After artificial intelligence is deeply integrated into the city, urban infrastructure and service management will evolve from automation to autonomy, and artificial intelligence will replace human intelligence to control the operation of the city to a considerable extent, which is unprecedented in the history of human civilization. With the assistance of high-frequency and high-dimensional data, artificial intelligence has begun to be able to deal with the problems of complex urban systems, and the governance of cities and regions will present a new way, which will be more efficient and flat. Any country that grasps such capabilities and opportunities will greatly promote economic growth and social innovation, and effectively improve the modernization of governance systems and governance capabilities. For the open and complex giant system of the city, if it is still understood and controlled by conventional cyber-physical system methods, it can have catastrophic consequences. Needless to say, at present, the relevant industries lack the necessary vigilance and accumulation in both theory and practice, and we need to create a new methodology that is integrated and integrated.
3. Data-driven
The Guiding Opinions put forward that "give full play to the role of collaborative optimization, reuse and efficiency enhancement, integration and innovation of data elements", "explore an integrated smart governance system at the grassroots level, accelerate the return of high-frequency data to the grassroots level in compliance with regulations, form an application service system that can effectively precipitate and quickly share grassroots data, and promote business collaboration and linkage between the upper and lower levels." ”
"The essence of the city is to meet the growing needs of people through the centralized supply of facilities and services. "If in the industrial age, we can meet the growth of demand by inventing and producing more products and creating more urban space, then in the information age, we need to connect supply and demand more efficiently through data and computing, achieve more accurate matching, and make limited stock resources more efficient. This is the basic mechanism for realizing the collaborative optimization of urban systems based on data elements.
Urban data that can describe dynamic information such as population flow, facility use, and service demand is a necessary support for high-frequency and high-dimensional urban governance. It not only provides macro summary information or cross-sectional fragment information, but also helps us accurately identify and regulate the dynamic coupling relationship of "people-flow-facilities-resources-space" in the city through the description of the operation of various "flows" and "fields" in the city, so as to achieve timely and comprehensive governance response to the complex urban system. The pandemic has made us feel this changing trend. Under the condition of the high-speed flow of various personnel information, material information, policy instruction information, and public opinion information, we have a stronger understanding that urban governance should pay more attention to high-frequency, high-precision, and multi-dimensional data portrayal and spatio-temporal matching.
In the era of large models, the use and meaning of data are changing, but the value of data to smart cities is still increasing day by day. As the basis for large model training, AI has been able to understand a variety of data modalities, including text, images, sound, video, and 3D. Some of the data that was previously only useful in segmentation suddenly has a more strategic value. Whether it is data collection, model training, or data openness, it is necessary to re-understand the value of various types of data. For example, the 3D data of urban space was only used to describe and manage the physical space, and these precious 3D spatial corpus, which is also the basis of the 3D large model, are obviously outdated if they are collected and then shelved or only used as a spatial base map. Governments and public institutions should re-understand and evaluate the scope and strategy of data value and data openness, so as to promote the establishment of various urban large models, and truly realize the collaborative optimization, reuse and efficiency of data elements, and integrate and innovate.
Fourth, the spatio-temporal framework
"Encourage qualified localities to promote the functional integration, coordinated development, and application empowerment of basic platforms such as urban information models, spatio-temporal big data, basic land and space information, and real-life 3D China, so as to provide a unified spatio-temporal framework for urban digital transformation, promote the construction of digital twin cities in an orderly manner according to local conditions, and promote the implementation of digital twin scenarios such as virtual and real symbiosis, simulation deduction, and iterative optimization. "On the surface, this is a technical integration requirement, but it's actually starting to really understand that several different-sounding platform concepts are essentially pointing to the most important spatiotemporal attributes of the city.
One trend in the evolution of various subsystems of human settlements is that functions, facilities, and services are decoupled from fixed spaces, and recoupled in the spatio-temporal dimension through the connection of "flows, fields, and networks". The next step after the Internet connects "people and things" will be the connection between people and objects and space containers to form a new "space-time scene", and then accurately match various resources and supply and demand relationships through spatio-temporal algorithms. This efficient matching of the supply and demand of space-time resources is the basic logic of smart cities.
Various emerging business formats, such as shared bicycles, online car-hailing, express delivery, and self-driving taxis, are typical scenarios for dynamic matching of space-time resources. The demand and supply of facilities and services are dynamic, and high-frequency dynamic connectivity and computing power are required. Furthermore, the space function is decoupled from the physical space, and the dynamic matching of space, function and user needs is realized through prefabricated construction and intelligent sensors.
The decoupling and reconstruction of functions and physical space brought about by ICT technology has changed the basic logic of space operation. At the industrial level, the organizational logic of the industrial space should be reconstructed, and the division of labor between urban and rural industries should be rearranged in response to the trend of unmanned manufacturing and C2M (user-connected manufacturing) customization. At the community level, people are increasingly forming communities based on shared work and interests, choosing where to live more flexibly, and the low-frequency, low-private functions in the house are transformed into shared quasi-public spaces. The response and co-ordination of these trends require a highly resilient and open spatio-temporal framework.
5. Scenario thinking
"Promote the deep coupling of integrated energy services with energy-using scenarios such as smart communities, smart parks, and smart buildings, and use digital technology to improve the green and low-carbon benefits of comprehensive energy services. Promote the integration of new energy vehicles into the new power system, and promote the coordinated development of urban intelligent infrastructure and intelligent networked vehicles. "Although this is only a guide to the synergy between innovative energy systems and buildings and transportation systems, it reflects the shift from single-system thinking to cross-system scenario thinking.
In the past decade, the level of informatization in cities, especially in the field of government services, has been rapidly improved, and the original foundation of urban perception has been widely built in cities. However, these sensing networks are mainly based on the business needs of various departments and enterprises, and lack overall planning. To a considerable extent, the digital technology represented by the mobile Internet has only completed the shallow connection of people, things, and flows, or the basic digital transformation. In the development stage of new technologies represented by the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence technology, a deeper decoupling and reorganization of social space and physical space will be carried out to create new industrial logic and spatial value.
"Scene" planning is a very abstract and comprehensive concept, which can be understood as the overall arrangement of various elements in the container of urban space, which is naturally a way of thinking that breaks the boundaries of the system. Urban planning focuses on physical spatial elements. The scenario theory of the Chicago School has comprehensively studied urban space and social space, while smart cities need to consider spatial and ICT elements comprehensively. Smart city scene design can be analogous to the scene design of movies and games, from the story line to the world view, from the lens language to the lighting props, which needs to be comprehensively analyzed from the operational logic level of the entire system.
In the future, there are multiple implementation paths and possibilities, and there is no single technical solution for most scenarios, which cannot be decided by scientists in the laboratory, but requires trial and error, iteration and improvement in real urban scenarios, and finally becomes a consensus. Innovative enterprises develop and improve products on site, and through the process reengineering of all urban systems, form a closed loop from product development and landing, to collect and analyze user data, improve and iterate products, and naturally form an industrial ecology based on innovation. This kind of demand is actually the real meaning of top-down top-down design.
The guidance is very informative, and the above is just a personal understanding of some of the key innovations. These aspects reflect the comprehensive improvement of our understanding and methods of smart cities and even urban systems. It is believed that under its guidance, the construction of smart cities in mainland China will usher in a new round of healthier and more balanced development.