Smart solutions shape for sustainable low-carbon future: A review on smart cities and industrial parks in China

To promote sustainable urban development and green industrial process are critical solutions for sustainable and low-carbon society transition in China, considering the significant environmental impacts derived from the industrialization and surging urbanization. Under this background, China adopts top-down programs on smart cities and smart industrial parks to forward the above efforts. While practices and lessons from these programs will be valuable to enlighten other regions and practitioners, to date, rather few studies have paid attentions to this issue. Particularly, the emerging smart technologies strongly support the practice, via offering smart solutions like better renewable energy projection, low-carbon life styles transformation, as well as energy planning and management. However, there has been a lack of discussing their future role in-depth. With this circumstance, this paper conducts an integrated and in-depth review on China's promotion on smart cities and smart industrial parks. In detail, the national pilots, key technical innovations, incentives and policies framework, as well as spatial features were discussed in-depth. Particularly, we further explored how the smart solutions can contribute to better decision making on low-carbon urban and industrial system planning. Finally, we highlighted policy recommendations targeting on future smart cities and industrial parks promotion, focusing on the perspectives of technological and social system innovations, innovative decision support tools, and smart management framework. Our results expect to offer critical enlightenments for policy makers to address future concerns on smart cities and industrial parks promotion and management.