The Study of Government's Role and Policy-making to the Development of Smart City as the Catalyst of China's New Type of Urbanization The Experience from the EU Cities

China's new type of urbanization is a timely reflection to the challenges and pressures arising from China's traditional urbanization model. The new urbanization model is an effort to steer the country's urbanization from the hard infrastructure fervor onto the resource-efficient, sustainable, and balanced development path, which essentially involves the smart city solutions. The smart city in concept casts urban performance as a function of complex informatization systems, comprised of a specific set of cutting-edge technologies to improve the performance of city construction, to collect information for intelligent decision making in urban management, and to improve the quality of urban living.,The practitioners, that is, government administration plays an indispensable role in the emerging initiatives of smart cities. The complexity and challenges faced by smart city solutions require government to introduce scientific smart city planning and detailed guidance, create feasible business models to facilitate the cooperation and division of work between the public and private sectors, and leverage on smart cities' market potential to improve urban competitiveness and attractiveness to investors and residents. The European Union (EU) and its member states, in particular, have devoted constant efforts to building smart cities during the past decades and their accumulated experiences would offer a set of lessons for China's ongoing smart city development.