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Big Data driving innovation in governance of cities

Author  :  Li Yongjie     Source  :        2016-11-15

The Innovation Forum on China Urban Governance was held in Shenzhen, South China’s Guangdong Province on Oct. 29. Scholars brainstormed on issues like innovative development, Big Data and urban governance.

Cities are the origins and centers for innovation, said Ma Mingjie, vice director-general of the TechnoEconomic Research Department under the Development Research Center of the State Council. A major part of the nation’s innovation resources are concentrated in areas with developed economies, and that is the result of the profit-seeking nature of the innovation factors, which motivates them to flow toward areas with higher cost-effectiveness, he said.

Rapid urbanization in China has caused problems, including difficulties of integrating rural migrants into urban society, the irrationality of the scale structure of cities and an imbalance between the spatial location of cities and the fragile environment.

In regard to China’s urbanization, Li Zhongshang, a professor from the School of Marxism Studies at Renmin University of China, said urbanization should always be people centered, and a proper legal system will lay the foundation for modern urban governance.

Big Data is the key element for a smart city, and it is also the engine of information for the establishment of a smart city, said Chen Tan, president of the Public Administration School of Guangzhou University. To some extent, the brain of a city may be seen as a Big Data system. For a city to be smart, it requires the development of Big Data about it, he said. Big Data will support social management, life service, developmental plan and mechanism innovation, he said.

However, Big Data is currently incapable of solving every problem, said Zhang Xiaojin, director of the Department of Political Science at Tsinghua University. Scholars and leaders must tackle such issues as hierarchical reporting and the systematic consolidation of the data to gain insight into the current situation and predict the future, Zhang said.

Obstacles for applying big data still exist, he said, adding that overreliance on technology to resolve major issues will expose its own limitations. B

Editor: Yu Hui

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