In July 2021, extraordinary rainstorms caused severe waterlogging across Henan, including its capital Zhengzhou; in October, several cities in Shanxi set rainfall records and suffered floods and geological disasters. In an economy increasingly run on data, can digital systems warn and respond when a city faces crisis – and make urban management more resilient?
During two years of pandemic control, health codes built on big data supported prevention work everywhere. The next step, experts argue, is precision: moving from ‘no one missed’ to ‘no one missed, no one wrongly included’ – the humane side of data-driven management.
Building urban resilience
Chen Xiangsheng, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said urban safety – fire, flood, traffic accidents, gas leaks – rests on three-dimensional resilience: resilient infrastructure, orderly affairs with rules that can be followed, and effective management where sensitive data can be known, judged and decided upon.
City-building has produced urban ailments – congestion, pollution, waterlogging, ecological pressure, space shortage – some near critical levels. The cure is modern technology for sensing everything, connecting everything and making everything intelligent, with city management designed link by link along that path. But current perception is weak and fragmented; integration of sensing and data is the requirement.
Yue Kun, a Huawei vice president, argued the digital city should be built like a living organism – perception, hub, applications, network and data forming a city intelligence that metabolises and grows, so the whole city can adjust and develop.
Chen used Zhengzhou’s floods to illustrate multi-hazard coupling in urban planning: the city has expanded 5.5 times since 1984, much of it onto what were once flood storage zones, while the only drainage channel can carry 8,000 cubic metres a day against a storm volume of 350 million cubic metres. Planning has to account for such compounding risks.
In transport, full-element sensing plus deep learning can ease congestion – but much traffic data is heterogeneous, with inconsistent standards and weak sharing. Chen’s team wanted to build a smart-transport data hub for the Greater Bay Area and could not: Shenzhen’s and Guangzhou’s data could be shared, but standards differed. The core, he said, is a unified, interoperable data platform – and once it exists, big data, cloud computing and AR/VR/MR enable real-time city operations and applications from autonomous driving to remote precision medicine.
Wise decisions are harder than data collection. Emergency response can have only one voice – several managers will conflict – so AI, 5G, big data, cloud and digital twins should converge into a unified smart city governance platform, and future city planning should move toward integration.
Serving people with flexibility
Shanghai and Shenzhen are recognised leaders in city management, both running government affairs on unified ‘one-network’ platforms that connect departments – a prefecture-level city has at least 40 bureaus, and Beijing’s system gathered 68 different systems in 2019. Zheng Lei, a Fudan University professor who directs a Shanghai urban digital governance lab, stressed that the platform spans three levels – city, district and street – because implementation happens at the street level; perception without decision and execution produces no real effect.
Zheng cited Shanghai’s testing response at Disneyland as a case in precise crowd management: instead of closing all facilities and creating a crush at the gates, the park kept rides running and even set off fireworks to distribute people, with over 200 testing positions processing visitors quickly. Big data identified anyone who had visited, and test results for 68,000 people were published the next day – all negative.
His point is a design principle: data can be used to expand controls or to make them precise. The harder half of precision – finding the few who need attention without disturbing everyone else – is what makes data-driven governance both effective and humane, and that is a city-wide commitment, not just a technical choice.
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